Superintelligence

By definition, you can't understand it. The moment you mention a term like "super-human intelligence," it should be self-evident that you've identified something that, practically by definition, you cannot understand, and the only reason for which we would ever seek to develop such a thing is the very fact that it can do things better …

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Falsifying Economics

You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet The most common job in a majority of US States is "truck driver." Tesla is testing an all-electric, self-driving semi truck that can operate autonomously 98% of the time — just needs help in construction zones and the "last mile" between the off ramp and the loading dock.  And Starsky …

Can We Be Hacked?

[T]he problem is the hijacking of the human mind: systems that are better and better at steering what people are paying attention to, and better and better at steering what people do with their time than ever before. These are things like “Snapchat streaks,” which is hooking kids to send messages back and forth with …

Thinking Collectively

TL;DR How We Think One of the most important ways in which our brains encode information in the form of grown relationships between neurons is so-called "Hebbian" associative learning, commonly represented in the catch-phrase "neurons that fire together, wire together."  More specifically, in an interaction between two neurons, if the downstream or "post-synaptic" neuron is …

Ideological Capture

For the uninitiated I’m going to review some background that I believe is generally accepted among experts before I get to the real point, so if you prefer to jump to where I actually tell you what I think it all means, click here.  And if you think this post is worth thinking about, don't forget …

Unorthodox Ravings is Born

Hello, world. I have been noticing lately that I am upsetting a lot of my friends on Facebook by irrepressibly diving neck-deep into seemingly every one of the most controversial issues of our times without really seeming to change any minds. At the same time, I find many of these issues to be so consequential …