Rationality  volume 2

Rationality: From AI to Zombies - Volume 2

The second volume of the Less Wrong book Rationality: From AI to Zombies. This book would not have been possible without the help of our Kickstarter backers.

It contains the following sequences:

  • The Simple Math of Evolution
  • Fragile Purposes
  • A Human’s Guide to Words
  • Lawful Truth
  • Reductionism 101
  • Joy in the Merely Real
  • Physicalism 201
  • Quantum Physics and Many Worlds
  • Science and Rationality

Please send any feedback to support+the.sequences@castify.co.


Adaptation Executers, Not Fitness Maximizers

Play f114902fd0cfda50800be7fbb69752c4badad535050adaaeb6927f96d31eb7c8

  1. An Alien God

    "A curious aspect of the theory of evolution," said Jacques Monod, "is that everybody thinks he understands it." A human being, looking at the natural world, se

  2. The Wonder Of Evolution

    Followup to: An Alien God The wonder of evolution is that it works at all. I mean that literally: If you want to marvel at evolution, that's what's marvel-wor

  3. Evolutions Are Stupid (But Work Anyway)

    Followup to: An Alien God, The Wonder of Evolution Yesterday, I wrote: Science has a very exact idea of the capabilities of evolution. If you praise evolutio

  4. No Evolutions For Corporations Or Nanodevices

    "The laws of physics and the rules of math don't cease to apply. That leads me to believe that evolution doesn't stop. That further leads me to believe

  5. Evolving To Extinction

    Followup to: Evolutions Are Stupid It is a very common misconception that an evolution works for the good of its species. Can you remember hearing someone tal

  6. The Tragedy Of Group Selectionism

    Before 1966, it was not unusual to see serious biologists advocating evolutionary hypotheses that we would now regard as magical thinking. These muddled notion

  7. Fake Optimization Criteria

    Followup to: Fake Justification, The Tragedy of Group Selectionism I've previously dwelt in considerable length upon forms of rationalization whereby our beliefs appear to match the evidence much more strongly than they actually do. And I'm not overemphasizing the point, either.

  8. Adaptation Executers, Not Fitness Maximizers

    "Individual organisms are best thought of as adaptation-executers rather than as fitness-maximizers." -John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, The Psychological F

  9. Evolutionary Psychology

    Followup to: An Alien God, Adaptation-Executers not Fitness-Maximizers Like "IRC chat" or "TCP/IP protocol", the phrase "reproductive organ" is redundant. All

  10. An Especially Elegant Evolutionary Psychology Experiment

    Followup to: Adaptation-Executers not Fitness-Maximizers, The Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary "In a 1989 Canadian study, adults were asked to imagine the death

  11. Superstimuli And The Collapse Of Western Civilization

    At least three people have died playing online games for days without rest. People have lost their spouses, jobs, and children to World of Warcraft. If people

  12. Thou Art Godshatter

    Followup to: An Alien God, Adaptation-Executers not Fitness-Maximizers, Evolutionary Psychology Before the 20th century, not a single human being had an explic

  13. Belief In Intelligence

    Previously in series: Expected Creative Surprises Since I am so uncertain of Kasparov's moves, what is the empirical content of my belief that "Kasparov is a

  14. Humans In Funny Suits

    Followup to: The Psychological Unity of Humankind Many times the human species has travelled into space, only to find the stars inhabited by aliens who look r

  15. Optimization And The Intelligence Explosion

    Lest anyone get the wrong impression, I'm juggling multiple balls right now and can't give the latest Singularity debate as much attention as it deserves. But lest I annoy my esteemed co-blogger, here is a down payment on my views of the Singularity - needless to say, all this is coming way out of order in the posting sequence, but here goes...

  16. Ghosts In The Machine

    Followup to: The Ultimate Source, Passing the Recursive Buck People hear about Friendly AI and say - this is one of the top three initial reactions: "Oh, you c

  17. Artificial Addition

  18. Terminal Values And Instrumental Values

    On a purely instinctive level, any human planner behaves as if they distinguish between means and ends. Want chocolate? There's chocolate at the Publix superm

  19. Leaky Generalizations

    Followup to: Terminal Values and Instrumental Values Are apples good to eat? Usually, but some apples are rotten. Do humans have ten fingers? Most of us do

  20. The Hidden Complexity Of Wishes

    Followup to: The Tragedy of Group Selectionism, Fake Optimization Criteria, Terminal Values and Instrumental Values, Artificial Addition, Leaky Generalizations

  21. Anthropomorphic Optimism

    Followup to: Humans in Funny Suits, The Tragedy of Group Selectionism The core fallacy of anthropomorphism is expecting something to be predicted by the black

  22. Lost Purposes

    It was in either kindergarten or first grade that I was first asked to pray, given a transliteration of a Hebrew prayer. I asked what the words meant. I was t

  23. The Parable Of The Dagger

    Once upon a time, there was a court jester who dabbled in logic. The jester presented the king with two boxes. Upon the first box was inscribed: "Either this

  24. The Parable Of Hemlock

    Followup to: The Parable of the Dagger "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore Socrates is mortal." - Aristotle(?) Socrates raised the glass of hemlock to his lips... "Do you suppose," asked one of the onlookers, "that even hemlock will not be enough to kill so wise and good a man?"

  25. Words As Hidden Inferences

  26. Extensions And Intensions

    Followup to: Words as Hidden Inferences "What is red?""Red is a color.""What's a color?""A color is a property of a thing." But what is a thing? And what's a property? Soon the two are lost in a maze of words defined in other words, the problem that Steven Harnad once described as trying to learn Chinese from a Chinese/Chinese dictionary.

  27. Similarity Clusters

    Followup to: Extensions and Intensions Once upon a time, the philosophers of Plato's Academy claimed that the best definition of human was a "featherless biped". Diogenes of Sinope, also called Diogenes the Cynic, is said to have promptly exhibited a plucked chicken and declared "Here is Plato's man."

  28. Typicality And Asymmetrical Similarity

    Followup to: Similarity Clusters Birds fly. Well, except ostriches don't. But which is a more typical bird-a robin, or an ostrich?Which is a more typical cha

  29. The Cluster Structure Of Thingspace

    Followup to: Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity The notion of a "configuration space" is a way of translating object descriptions into object positions. It may seem like blue is "closer" to blue-green than to red, but how much closer? It's hard to answer that question by just staring at the colors.

  30. Disguised Queries

    Followup to: The Cluster Structure of Thingspace Imagine that you have a peculiar job in a peculiar factory: Your task is to take objects from a mysterious co

  31. Neural Categories

    Followup to: Disguised Queries In Disguised Queries, I talked about a classification task of "bleggs" and "rubes". The typical blegg is blue, egg-shaped, furred, flexible, opaque, glows in the dark, and contains vanadium. The typical rube is red, cube-shaped, smooth, hard, translucent, unglowing, and contains palladium.

  32. How An Algorithm Feels From Inside

    Followup to: Neural Categories "If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" I remember seeing an actual argument get started on

  33. Disputing Definitions

    Followup to: How An Algorithm Feels From Inside I have watched more than one conversation-even conversations supposedly about cognitive science-go the route of

  34. Feel The Meaning

    Followup to: Disputing Definitions When I hear someone say, "Oh, look, a butterfly," the spoken phonemes "butterfly" enter my ear and vibrate on my ear drum, being transmitted to the cochlea, tickling auditory nerves that transmit activation spikes to the auditory cortex, where phoneme processing begins, along with recognition of words, and reconstruction of syntax (a by no means serial process), and all manner of other complications.

  35. The Argument From Common Usage

    Followup to: Feel the Meaning Part of the Standard Definitional Dispute runs as follows: Albert: "Look, suppose that I left a microphone in the forest and recorded the pattern of the acoustic vibrations of the tree falling. If I played that back to someone, they'd call it a 'sound'!

  36. Empty Labels

    Followup to: The Argument from Common Usage Consider (yet again) the Aristotelian idea of categories. Let's say that there's some object with properties A, B, C, D, and E, or at least it looks E-ish.

  37. Taboo Your Words

    Followup to: Empty Labels In the game Taboo (by Hasbro), the objective is for a player to have their partner guess a word written on a card, without using that

  38. Replace The Symbol With The Substance

    What does it take to-as in yesterday's example-see a "baseball game" as "An artificial group conflict in which you use a long wooden cylinder to whack a thrown spheroid, and then run between four safe positions"?

  39. Fallacies Of Compression

    Followup to: Replace the Symbol with the Substance "The map is not the territory," as the saying goes. The only life-size, atomically detailed, 100% accurate map of California is California. But California has important regularities, such as the shape of its highways, that can be described using vastly less information-not to mention vastly less physical material-than it would take to describe every atom within the state borders.

  40. Categorizing Has Consequences

    Followup to: Fallacies of Compression Among the many genetic variations and mutations you carry in your genome, there are a very few alleles you probably know-including those determining your blood type: the presence or absence of the A, B, and + antigens.

  41. Sneaking In Connotations

    Followup to: Categorizing Has Consequences Yesterday, we saw that in Japan, blood types have taken the place of astrology-if your blood type is AB, for example, you're supposed to be "cool and controlled". So suppose we decided to invent a new word, "wiggin", and defined this word to mean people with green eyes and black hair- A green-eyed man with black hair walked into a restaurant.

  42. Arguing By Definition

    Followup to: Sneaking in Connotations "This plucked chicken has two legs and no feathers-therefore, by definition, it is a human!" When people argue definition

  43. Where To Draw The Boundary

    Followup to: Arguing "By Definition" The one comes to you and says: Long have I pondered the meaning of the word "Art", and at last I've found what seems to m

  44. Entropy And Short Codes

    Followup to: Where to Draw the Boundary? Suppose you have a system X that's equally likely to be in any of 8 possible states: {X1, X2, X3, X4, X5, X6, X7, X8.

  45. Mutual Information And Density In Thingspace

    Continuation of: Entropy, and Short Codes Suppose you have a system X that can be in any of 8 states, which are all equally probable (relative to your current state of knowledge), and a system Y that can be in any of 4 states, all equally probable.

  46. Superexponential Conceptspace And Simple Words

    Followup to: Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace Thingspace, you might think, is a rather huge space. Much larger than reality, for where reality only contains things that actually exist, Thingspace contains everything that could exist.

  47. Conditional Independence And Naive Bayes

    Followup to: Searching for Bayes-Structure Previously I spoke of mutual information between X and Y, I(X;Y), which is the difference between the of the joint probability distribution, H(X,Y) and the entropies of the marginal distributions, H(X) + H(Y).

  48. Words As Mental Paintbrush Handles

    Followup to: Conditional Independence, and Naive Bayes (We should be done with the mathy posts, I think, at least for now. But forgive me if, ironically, I en

  49. Variable Question Fallacies

    Followup to: Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles Albert: "Every time I've listened to a tree fall, it made a sound, so I'll guess that other trees falling als

  50. 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong

    Followup to: Just about every post in February, and some in March Some reader is bound to declare that a better title for this post would be "37 Ways That You

  51. An Intuitive Explanation Of Bayes's Theorem

    Bayes' Theorem for the curious and bewildered; an excruciatingly gentle introduction.

  52. Universal Fire

    In L. Sprague de Camp's fantasy story The Incomplete Enchanter (which set the mold for the many imitations that followed), the hero, Harold Shea, is transported

  53. Universal Law

    Followup to: Universal Fire Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier discovered that breathing (respiration) and fire (combustion) operated on the same principle. It was

  54. Is Reality Ugly?

    Followup to: Beautiful Math, Expecting Beauty Yesterday I talked about the cubes {1, 8, 27, 64, 125, ...} and how their first differences {7, 19, 37, 61, ...}

  55. Beautiful Probability

    Followup to: Beautiful Math, Expecting Beauty, Is Reality Ugly? Should we expect rationality to be, on some level, simple? Should we search and hope for under

  56. Outside The Laboratory

    "Outside the laboratory, scientists are no wiser than anyone else." Sometimes this proverb is spoken by scientists, humbly, sadly, to remind themselves of thei

  57. The Second Law Of Thermodynamics, And Engines Of Cognition

    Followup to: Superexponential Conceptspace, and Simple Words The first law of thermodynamics, better known as Conservation of Energy, says that you can't crea

  58. Perpetual Motion Beliefs

    Followup to: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, and Engines of Cognition Yesterday's post concluded: To form accurate beliefs about something, you really do h

  59. Searching For Bayes Structure

    Followup to: Perpetual Motion Beliefs"Gnomish helms should not function. Their very construction seems to defy the nature of thaumaturgical law. In fact, the

  60. Dissolving The Question

    Followup to: How an Algorithm Feels From the Inside, Feel the Meaning, Replace the Symbol with the Substance "If a tree falls in the forest, but no one hears i

  61. Wrong Questions

    Followup to: Dissolving the Question, Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions Where the mind cuts against reality's grain, it generates wrong questions-ques

  62. Righting A Wrong Question

    Followup to: How an Algorithm Feels from the Inside, Dissolving the Question, Wrong Questions When you are faced with an unanswerable question-a question to wh

  63. Mind Projection Fallacy

    Followup to: How an Algorithm Feels From Inside In the dawn days of science fiction, alien invaders would occasionally kidnap a girl in a torn dress and carry

  64. Probability Is In The Mind

    Followup to: The Mind Projection Fallacy Yesterday I spoke of the Mind Projection Fallacy, giving the example of the alien monster who carries off a girl in a

  65. The Quotation Is Not The Referent

    Followup to: The Mind Projection Fallacy, Probability is in the Mind In classical logic, the operational definition of identity is that whenever 'A=B' is a theorem, you can substitute 'A' for 'B' in any theorem where B appears.

  66. Qualitatively Confused

    Followup to: Probability is in the Mind, The Quotation is not the Referent I suggest that a primary cause of confusion about the distinction between "belief",

  67. Think Like Reality

    Whenever I hear someone describe quantum physics as "weird" - whenever I hear someone bewailing the mysterious effects of observation on the observed, or the bi

  68. Chaotic Inversion

    I was recently having a conversation with some friends on the topic of hour-by-hour productivity and willpower maintenance-something I've struggled with my whol

  69. Reductionism

    Followup to: How An Algorithm Feels From Inside, Mind Projection Fallacy Almost one year ago, in April 2007, Matthew C submitted the following suggestion for a

  70. Explaining Vs. Explaining Away

    Followup to: Reductionism, Righting a Wrong Question John Keats's Lamia (1819) surely deserves some kind of award for Most Famously Annoying Poetry:

  71. Fake Reductionism

    Followup to: Explaining vs. Explaining Away, Fake Explanation There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the du

  72. Savanna Poets

    Followup to: Explaining vs. Explaining Away "Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars-mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too

  73. Joy In The Merely Real

    Followup to: Explaining vs. Explaining Away ...Do not all charms fly At the mere touch of cold philosophy? There was an awful rainbow once in heaven: We know her woof, her texture; she is given In the dull catalogue of common things. -John Keats, Lamia "Nothing is 'mere'."

  74. Joy In Discovery

    Followup to: Joy in the Merely Real "Newton was the greatest genius who ever lived, and the most fortunate; for we cannot find more than once a system of the

  75. Bind Yourself To Reality

    Followup to: Joy in the Merely Real So perhaps you're reading all this, and asking: "Yes, but what does this have to do with reductionism?" Partially, it's a matter of leaving a line of retreat. It's not easy to take something important apart into components, when you're convinced that this removes magic from the world, unweaves the rainbow.

  76. If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help

    Followup to: Explaining vs. Explaining Away, Joy in the Merely Real Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even

  77. Mundane Magic

    Followup to: Joy in the Merely Real, Joy in Discovery, If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help As you may recall from some months earlier, I think that part of t

  78. The Beauty Of Settled Science

    Facts do not need to be unexplainable, to be beautiful; truths do not become less worth learning, if someone else knows them; beliefs do not become less worthwhile, if many others share them... ...and if you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage.

  79. Amazing Breakthrough Day: April 1st

    So you're thinking, "April 1st... isn't that already supposed to be April Fool's Day?" Yes-and that will provide the ideal cover for celebrating Amazing Breakthrough Day. As I argued in " The Beauty of Settled Science", it is a major problem that media coverage of science focuses only on breaking news.

  80. Is Humanism A Religion Substitute?

    Followup to: Bind Yourself to Reality For many years before the Wright Brothers, people dreamed of flying with magic potions. There was nothing irrational abo

  81. Scarcity

    What follows is taken primarily from Robert Cialdini's Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. I own three copies of this book, one for myself, and two for loaning to friends. S carcity, as that term is used in social psychology, is when things become more desirable as they appear less obtainable.

  82. The Sacred Mundane

    Followup to: Is Humanism a Religion-Substitute? So I was reading (around the first half of) Adam Frank's The Constant Fire, in preparation for my Bloggingheads

  83. To Spread Science, Keep It Secret

    Followup to: Joy in Discovery, Bind Yourself to Reality, Scientific Evidence, Scarcity Sometimes I wonder if the Pythagoreans had the right idea. Yes, I've wri

  84. Initiation Ceremony

    The torches that lit the narrow stairwell burned intensely and in the wrong color, flame like melting gold or shattered suns. 192... 193... Brennan's

  85. Hand Vs. Fingers

    Followup to: Reductionism, Explaining vs. Explaining Away, Fake Reductionism Back to our original topic: Reductionism, which (in case you've forgotten) is par

  86. Angry Atoms

    Followup to: Hand vs. Fingers Fundamental physics-quarks 'n stuff-is far removed from the levels we can see, like hands and fingers. At best, you can know how

  87. Heat Vs. Motion

    Followup to: Angry Atoms After yesterday's post, it occurred to me that there's a much simpler example of reductionism jumping a gap of apparent-difference-in-

  88. Brain Breakthrough! It's Made Of Neurons!

    In an amazing breakthrough, a multinational team of scientists led by Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal announced that the brain is composed of a ridiculously complicated network of tiny cells connected to each other by infinitesimal threads and branches.

  89. When Anthropomorphism Became Stupid

    Followup to: Humans in Funny Suits, Brain Breakthrough It turns out that most things in the universe don't have minds. This statement would have provoked incredulity among many earlier cultures. " Animism" is the usual term. They thought that trees, rocks, streams, and hills all had spirits because, hey, why not?

  90. A Priori

    See also: Comments on "How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3" Traditional Rationality is phrased as social rules, with violations interpretable as cheating: if yo

  91. Reductive Reference

    Followup to: Reductionism, Explaining vs. Explaining Away, Hand vs. Fingers, Heat vs. Motion The reductionist thesis (as I formulate it) is that human minds, f

  92. Zombies! Zombies?

    Your "zombie", in the philosophical usage of the term, is putatively a being that is exactly like you in every respect-identical behavior, identical speech, ide

  93. Zombie Responses

    Continuation of: Zombies! Zombies? I'm a bit tired today, having stayed up until 3AM writing yesterday's >6000-word post on zombies, so today I'll just reply t

  94. The Generalized Anti Zombie Principle

    Followup to: Zombies! Zombies? "Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems." -Rene Descartes, Discours de

  95. Gazp Vs. Glut

    Followup to: The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle In "The Unimagined Preposterousness of Zombies", Daniel Dennett says: To date, several philosophers have to

  96. Belief In The Implied Invisible

    Followup to: The Generalized Anti-Zombie Principle One generalized lesson not to learn from the Anti-Zombie Argument is, "Anything you can't see doesn't exist.

  97. Zombies: The Movie

    FADE IN around a serious-looking group of uniformed military officers. At the head of the table, a senior, heavy-set man, GENERAL FRED, speaks. GENERAL FRED:

  98. Excluding The Supernatural

    Followup to: Reductionism, Anthropomorphic Optimism Occasionally, you hear someone claiming that creationism should not be taught in schools, especially not as

  99. Psychic Powers

    Followup to: Excluding the Supernatural Yesterday, I wrote: If the "boring view" of reality is correct, then you can never predict anything irreducible because

  100. Quantum Explanations

    I think I must now temporarily digress from the sequence on zombies (which was a digression from the discussion of reductionism, which was a digression from the

  101. Configurations And Amplitudes

    Previously in series: Quantum Explanations So the universe isn't made of little billiard balls, and it isn't made of crests and troughs in a pool of aether...

  102. Joint Configurations

    Previously in series: Configurations and Amplitude The key to understanding configurations, and hence the key to understanding quantum mechanics, is realizing

  103. Distinct Configurations

    Previously in series: Joint Configurations Yesterday's experiment carried two key lessons: First, we saw that because amplitude flows can cancel out, and because our magic measure of squared modulus is not linear, the identity of configurations is nailed down-you can't reorganize configurations the way you can regroup possible worlds.

  104. Collapse Postulates

    Previously in series: Spooky Action at a DistanceFollowup to: Decoherence is Simple, Falsifiable and Testable Back when people didn't know about macroscopic d

  105. Decoherence Is Simple

    An epistle to the physicists: When I was but a little lad, my father, a Ph.D. physicist, warned me sternly against meddling in the affairs of physicists; he sai

  106. Decoherence Is Falsifiable And Testable

    Continuation of: Decoherence is Simple The words "falsifiable" and "testable" are sometimes used interchangeably, which imprecision is the price of speaking in

  107. Privileging The Hypothesis

    Suppose that the police of Largeville, a town with a million inhabitants, are investigating a murder in which there are few or no clues-the victim was stabbed t

  108. Living In Many Worlds

    Followup to: Many Worlds, One Best Guess Some commenters have recently expressed disturbance at the thought of constantly splitting into zillions of other peop

  109. Quantum Non Realism

    Followup to: Bell's Theorem "Does the moon exist when no one is looking at it?" -Albert Einstein, asked of Niels Bohr Suppose you were just starting t

  110. If Many Worlds Had Come First

    Followup to: Collapse Postulates, Decoherence is Simple, Falsifiable and Testable Not that I'm claiming I could have done better, if I'd been born into that tim

  111. Where Philosophy Meets Science

    Followup to: Distinct Configurations Looking back on early quantum physics-not for purposes of admonishing the major figures, or to claim that we could have done better if we'd been born into that era; but in order to try and learn a moral, and do better next time-looking back on the dark ages of quantum physics, I say, I would nominate as the "most basic" error...

  112. Thou Art Physics

    Followup to: Dissolving the Question, Hand vs. Fingers, Timeless Causality, Living in Many-Worlds Three months ago-jeebers, has it really been that long?-I pos

  113. Many Words, One Best Guess

    Previously in series: Collapse PostulatesFollowup to: Bell's Theorem, Spooky Action at a Distance, Quantum Non-Realism, Decoherence is Simple, Falsifiable and

  114. The Failures Of Eld Science

    Followup to: Initiation Ceremony, If Many-Worlds Had Come First This time there were no robes, no hoods, no masks. Students were expected to become friends, a

  115. The Dilemma: Science Or Bayes?

    Followup to: If Many-Worlds Had Come First, The Failures of Eld Science "Eli: You are writing a lot about physics recently. Why?" -Shane Legg (and sev

  116. Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality

    Followup to: The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? Scott Aaronson suggests that Many-Worlds and libertarianism are similar in that they are both cases of bullet-swall

  117. When Science Can't Help

    Followup to: Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality, My Wild and Reckless Youth Once upon a time, a younger Eliezer had a stupid theory. Let's say that Elieze

  118. Science Isn't Strict Enough

    Followup to: When Science Can't Help Once upon a time, a younger Eliezer had a stupid theory. Eliezer18 was careful to follow the precepts of Traditional Rati

  119. Do Scientists Already Know This Stuff?

    Followup to: Science Isn't Strict Enough poke alleges: "Being able to create relevant hypotheses is an important skill and one a scientist spends a great deal

  120. No Safe Defense, Not Even Science

    Followup to: Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality, Do Scientists Already Know This Stuff? I don't ask my friends about their childhoods-I lack social curiosi

  121. Changing The Definition Of Science

    New Scientist on changing the definition of science, ungated here: Others believe such criticism is based on a misunderstanding. "Some people say that the multiverse concept isn't falsifiable because it's unobservable-but that's a fallacy," says cosmologist Max Tegmark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  122. Faster Than Science

    Followup to: Science Doesn't Trust Your Rationality, Einstein's Arrogance I sometimes say that the method of science is to amass such an enormous mountain of evidence that even scientists cannot ignore it; and that this is the distinguishing characteristic of a scientist, a non-scientist will ignore it anyway.

  123. Einstein's Speed

    Followup to: Faster Than Science Yesterday I argued that the Powers Beyond Science are actually a standard and necessary part of the social process of science.

  124. That Alien Message

    Followup to: Einstein's Speed Imagine a world much like this one, in which, thanks to gene-selection technologies, the average IQ is 140 (on our scale). Poten

  125. My Childhood Role Model

    Followup to: That Alien Message When I lecture on the Singularity, I often draw a graph of the "scale of intelligence" as it appears in everyday life: But thi

  126. Einstein's Superpowers

    Followup to: Einstein's Speed, My Childhood Role Model, Timeless Physics There is a widespread tendency to talk (and think) as if Einstein, Newton, and similar

  127. Class Project

    Followup to: The Failures of Eld Science, Einstein's Superpowers "Do as well as Einstein?" Jeffreyssai said, incredulously. "Just as well as Einstein? Albert

  128. A Technical Explanation Of Technical Explanation

    More Bayes. Many of my other writings rely on this page.

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