As per a recent comment this thread is meant to voice contrarian opinions, that is anything this community tends not to agree with. Thus I ask you to post your contrarian views and upvote anything you do not agree with based on personal beliefs. Spam and trolling still needs to be downvoted.
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
The replication initiative (the push to replicate the majority of scientific studies) is reasonably likely to do more harm than good. Most of the points raised by Jason Mitchell in The Emptiness of Failed Replications are correct.
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Human value is not complex, wireheading is the optimal state, and Fun Theory is mostly wrong.
Open borders is a terrible idea and could possibly lead to the collapse of civilization as we know it.
EDIT: I should clarify:
Whether you want open borders and whether you want the immigration status quo are different questions. I happen to be against both, but it is perfectly consistent for somebody to be against open borders but be in favor of the current level of immigration. The claim is specifically about completely unrestricted migration as advocated by folks like Bryan Caplan. Please direct your upvotes/downvotes to the former claim, rather than the latter.
Do you mind telling me how you think he's being uncharitable? I agree mostly with your first two statements. (If you don't want to put it on this public forum because hot debated topic etc I'd appreciate it if you could PM; I won't take you down the 'let's argue feminism' rabbit-hole.)
(I've always wondered if there was a way to rebut him, but I don't know enough of the relevant sciences to try and construct an argument myself, except in syllogistic form. And even then, it seems his statements on feminists are correct.)
How smart does a mind have to be to qualify as a "superintelligence"? It's pretty clear that intelligence can go a lot higher than current levels.
What do you predict would happen if we uploaded Von Neumann's brain onto an extremely fast, planet-sized supercomputer? What do you predict would happen if we selectively bred humans for intelligence for a couple million years? "Impractical" would be understandable, but I don't see how you can believe superintelligence is "incoherent".
As for "Intelligence explosion isn't possible", that's a lot more reasonable, e.g. see the entire AI foom debate.
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Buying a lottery ticket every now and then is not irrational. Unless you have thoroughly optimized the conversion of every dollar you own into utility-yielding investments and expenses, the exposure to large positive tail risk netted by spending a few dollars on lottery tickets can still be rational.
Phrased another way, when you buy a lottery ticket you aren't buying an investment, you're buying a possibility that is not available otherwise.
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Fossil fuels will remain the dominant source of energy until we build something much smarter than ourselves. Efforts spent on alternative energy sources are enormously inefficient and mostly pointless.
Related claim: the average STEM-type person has no gut-level grasp of the quantity of energy consumed by the economy and this leads to popular utopian claims about alternative energy.
Having political beliefs is silly. Movements like neoreaction or libertarianism or whatever will succeed or fail mostly independently of whether their claims are true. Lies aren't threatened by the truth per se, they're threatened by more virulent lies and more virulent truths. Various political beliefs, while fascinating and perhaps true, are unimportant and worthless.
Arguing for or against various political beliefs functions mostly (1) to signal intelligence or allegiance or whatever, and (2) as mental masturbation, like playing Scrabble. "I want to improve politics" is just a thin veil that system 2 throws over system 1's urges to achieve (1) and (2).
If you actually think that improving politics is a productive thing to do, your best bet is probably something like "ensure more salt gets iodized so people will be smarter", or "build an FAI to govern us". But those options don't sound nearly as fun as writing political screeds.
(While "politics is the mind-killer" is LW canon, "believing political things is stupid" seems less widely-held.)
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Reductionism as a cognitive strategy has proven useful in a number of scientific and technical disciplines. However, reductionism as a metaphysical thesis (as presented in this post) is wrong. Verging on incoherent, even. I'm specifically talking about the claim that in reality "there is only the most basic level".
[Please read the OP before voting. Special voting rules apply.]
Causal connections should not be part of our most fundamental model of the Universe. Everything that is useful about causal narratives is a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which is irrelevant when we're talking about microscopic interactions. Extrapolating our macroscopic fascination with causation into the microscopic realm has actually impeded the exploration of promising possibilities in fundamental physics.
Roko's Basilisk legitimately demonstrates a problem with LW. "Rationality" that leads people to believe such absurd ideas is messed up, and 1) the presence of a significant number of people psychologically affected by the basilisk and 2) the fact that Eliezer accepts that basilisk-like ideas can be dangerous are signs that there is something wrong with the rationality practiced here.
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Biological hominids descended from modern humans will be the keystone species of biomes loosely descended from farms pastures and cities optimized for symbiosis and matter/energy flow between organisms, covering large fractions of the Earth's land, for tens of millions of years. In special cases there may be sub-biomes in which non-biological energy is converted into biomass, and it is possible that human-keystone ocean-based biomes might appear as well. Living things will continue to be the driving force of non-geological activity on Earth, with hominid-driven symbiosis (of which agriculture is an inefficient first draft) producing interesting new patterns materials and ecosystems.
Meta-comment: I'm not sure that structure or voting scheme is particularly useful. The hope would be to allow conversation about contrarian viewpoints which are actually worth investigating. I'm not sure how you separate the wheat from the chaff, but that should be the goal...
A word of advice: Perhaps anyone posting a comment here with the intention of voicing a contrarian opinion and getting upvotes for disagreement should indicate the fact explicitly in their comment. Otherwise I predict that the upvote/downvote signal will be severely corrupted by people voting "normally". (Especially if these comments produce discussion -- if A posts something you strongly disagree with and B posts a very good and clearly-explained reason for disagreeing, what are you supposed to do? I suggest the right thing here is to upvote both A and B, but it's liable to be easy to get confused...)
[EDITED to add: 1. For the avoidance of doubt, of course the above is not intended to be a controversial opinion and if you vote on it you should do so according to the normal conventions, not the special ones governing this discussion. 2. It is possible to edit your own comments; if you read the above and think it's sensible, but have already posted a contrarian opinion here, you can fix it.]
The universe we perceive is probably a simulation of a more complex Universe. In breaking with the simulation hypothesis, however, the simulation is not originated by humans. Instead, our existence is simply an emergent property of the physics (and stochasticity) of the simulation.
English has a pronoun that can be used for either gender and, as an accident of history not some hidden agenda, said pronoun in English is "he/him/&c."
Edited: VAuroch is the best kind of correct on "neuter" pronouns. Changed, though that might make a view less controversial than I thought (all but 2 readers agree, really?) even less so :)
There are some I hold:
- 1: evolution isn't inherently slow. Sometimes/often it can be faster than any other known method.
- 2: thinking is nothing but evolutionary process in our heads. No really deep secrets here to be uncovered.
- 3: from 1 and 2 a really near Singularity is possible, but not mandatory
- 4: the infinity is not even a coherent concept
- 5: there are no aliens nearby, life is rare (but this is not a contrarian position anymore)
- 6: Venus is hot due to volcanoes
- 7: Mother Nature is a stupid bitch. Some species - like wild dogs of Africa - make everything even worse
- 8: the Universe is not only to conquer, but to re-shape completely
- 9: Rome was magnificent, Carthage was not
- 10: the Relativity isn't coherent either