If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares (September 16, 2025), 272 pages.
“If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Eliezer Yudkowsky & Nate Soares – Review and Commentary
Science
Expertise, Meritocracy, Pseudo-Intellectualism, and the Problem of Testimony
The vast majority of what people “know” about any given subject they only know because someone told them, or they read it in a book or online, or heard someone talk about it online. The point being, we get our knowledge from what philosophers call the testimony of others. This worked out well in our hunter-gatherer past, when a member of a tribe knew everyone else in the tribe. Person A knows that person B is someone capable of or knowledgeable about X, and so person A can trust person B with telling them about X.
In much larger societies, such as in modern nation states, many, if not most, of the people we run into online and in our daily lives will be strangers, or at the very least not people we are intimately familiar with. This means that much of what we are told comes from strangers, who are usually themselves relaying information they were told from yet other strangers. Since we don’t know if these strangers know what they’re talking about, humans have come up with various means of lending their testimony legitimacy and trustworthiness.
The Myth of the Flat Earth
Let’s be up front: the notion that the earth is flat is ludicrous. Anyone who believes this either is ignorant of the evidence, or simply wants to believe it more strongly than they care about evidence. A lot of people seem to think it has more to do with the former, but it almost certainly has more to do with the latter. This is because humans crave meaning-making mythologies, and the conspiracy cult of the flat earth offers just that.
A Defense of the Biological Basis for Intelligence
Intelligence Quotient, or IQ, is supposed to be a measure of a person’s ability to reason, see patterns, and make predictions. Yet IQ is quite controversial – a controversy ranging anywhere from IQ tests being inaccurate or biased and all the way to IQ tests (and anything concerning IQ) being immoral. Yet, even if there is no test that can accurately and reliably gauge an individual’s intelligence in some quantitative way, most people are aware of some ineffable sense in which some individuals are just smarter than the average individual (and vice versa with some people just being less smart in some ways than other people).
“The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values” by Brian Christian – Review and Commentary – Part 2
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Briant Christian, W. W. Norton & Company (October 6, 2020), 496 pages
See Part 1 of the review here.
See Part 3 of the review here.
“The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values” by Brian Christian – Review and Commentary – Part 1
The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values by Briant Christian, W. W. Norton & Company (October 6, 2020), 496 pages
See Part 2 of the review here.
See Part 3 of the review here.
Quantum Computers, Shor’s Algorithm, and Post-Quantum Cryptography
Want to know how quantum computers really work? And why they can crack our best encryption systems? And how we might combat this? In this post, which is from a paper I wrote for a cybersecurity class where I went a bit above and beyond the assignment, I will go over these things. This post is long, but if you are interested in this, you might find it rewarding.
Is Value Neutrality Possible?
Objectivity, also known as value neutrality or impartiality, is one of the highest ideals of science. The principle behind it is that science studies mind-independent reality, i.e., that which continues to exist even if no consciousness is there to perceive or think about it. This mind-independent reality is devoid of all values – there is no such thing as “good and bad” or “useful” or “beautiful” when it comes to, say, galaxy formation or evolution by natural selection. A major criticism of science levied by critical theory is that value neutrality is impossible, even if we are to take the assumption that mind-independent reality exists and that mind-independent reality is value neutral. As such, instead of blinding ourselves to the values and biases that are inextricable from science, we ought to import the “correct” values into science (e.g., feminist science).
How Well Was COVID19 Handled? What Should We Have Done Differently?
The COVID19 pandemic saturated the news for a good eighteen months or better. Lately we don’t hear much about it anymore. If topics jawed about by the usual talking heads are to be gauged, everyone is over the whole pandemic thing. Few places still require masks and few people still voluntarily wear them. This, of course, ignores the fact that, with some six-and-a-half million people dead as a result of COVID infection, and ten times that many who got it and lived, there are a good deal of people who had their lives changed dramatically and permanently as a result of the pandemic. But now that the virus is endemic in a seemingly less pathogenic variant, it is a topic that has taken leave of the rapidly shifting zeitgeist of our modern times. Now is the time for postmortems by commentators and historians. That’s what I’m about to do here (as a commentator, not a historian).
Unsolvable Problems: Hyperobjects and Cognitive Closure
Possibly the guiding principle of modernity is that any problem can be solved if people just put their minds to it. Science and liberalism have been astonishing successes in raising the standard of living, in an objective sense, for more people than at any other time in history. People like Steven Pinker love to wax optimistic about how Enlightenment values and scientific progress have made the world an objectively better place to live than ever before, with the implication that things will only get better. But is this really true?
What is a Scientific Theory?
Scientists and science enthusiasts can get exasperated by the conflation of definitions between the scientific conception of a theory and the colloquial definition. In the latter, a theory is sometimes considered no better than a guess, and at best what a scientist would call a hypothesis (an educated formulation of a mechanism or explanation). People will say things like “evolution is just a theory” as if that attests to some shortcoming of evolution. In the scientific conception, a theory is the gold standard. It is a set of inferences, explanations, predictions, and interpretations that bring together (sometimes disparate) data, evidence, and observations into a cohesive whole. Theories are what scientists use to make predictions in order to formulate new hypotheses and design new experiments. But what is the nature of a theory? And what is the ontological status of a scientific theory? In what way is a theory true?
God Does Not Exist: Scientific Arguments
A few years ago I made a lengthy post on the philosophical arguments against the existence of God. I stated that it was the first in a series. This one is the second in that series. Here I will go through the scientific arguments for why I do not believe in the existence of God. Just like with my philosophical arguments, this will end up being a fairly long post and one which I will revise and add to periodically. As such, what you see may not be the final version of this post.
Updated 10/15/2023
Trust the Science?
A common refrain in the news media during these COVID years has been to “trust the science.” This is also a popular mantra when it comes to climate science. Yet, in the United States at least, trust in experts and institutions is at an all time low. The political right is skeptical of climate science, COVID vaccines, and scientific institutions like the NIH and CDC, seeing them as a means for the government to take away rights and for liberals to impose their will. The political left views science as a white colonialist means of subjugating those with other “ways of knowing” and upholding white, male privilege. So the question is: should we trust the science?
Book Review of “Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters” by Steven Pinker
Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker; Viking (September 28, 2021); 432 pages
Woke Science: a Toxic Marriage of Activism and Science?
In science, objectivity is the greatest virtue. In an ideal world, a scientist would be impartial, disinterested in the outcomes, never desiring one result over another. They would run the experiment, gather the data, and report the findings, even if the data showed something that refuted the scientists’ hypothesis or gave an uninteresting negative result. Experiments would be replicated by multiple different people to more rigorously determine the veracity of the results. Negative results would get published as often as positive results. Topics for study would be determined by a mixture of intellectual curiosity and potential for improving society in some measurable way. Science, to say the least, does not live up to this ideal. But is science redeemable?
Life on Venus: Proposed Biochemistry of Venusian Life
The possible detection of phosphines in the atmosphere of the planet Venus has sparked interest in possible biogenesis of the compound. In other words, there may be microscopic extraterrestrial organisms living up in the Venusian clouds. This would be an amazing discovery. But, it also raises the question about what sort of biochemistry such organisms (if they exist) utilize in their Venusian flavor of metabolism. Here I will make some speculations about this.
Resources for Physics and Math
Lately I have been teaching myself higher level physics and mathematics – reading books and watching Youtube videos on the subject. Here I am going to post some links to the resources I have been using for anyone else who may be interested. These resources are obviously not exhaustive of all the resources out there, but they’re the ones I’ve found to be very helpful. As I continue learning about these subjects, I will periodically update this post.
Is the Mind Immaterial or Material?
Cartesian dualism has been a point of contention in philosophy since at least, well, Descartes. The dispute is whether the mind is a separate, immaterial entity from the physical body. Problems have plagued the dualist view since the time of Descartes, primarily how it is that the immaterial mind and material body interact.
More CRISPR Gene Editing Babies
Nature reported that Russian molecular biologist Denis Rebrikov is planning to perform CRISPR experiments on human embryos. He’s running the experiments on the same CCR5 gene as Chinese scientist He Jiankui in 2018. This is once again raising questions on the ethics of human genetic experimentation.
Quantum Computing
What is quantum computing and why is it so damn difficult?