“There are many ways to stress a rat — but the easiest way is to inject it with stress hormones.”

Bonus data-burst from the same expert: According to all the rigorous cognitive tests neuroscientists are currently able to apply, crows are as intelligent as chimpanzees. (Yes, it seems preposterous, which is what makes it worth mentioning. No, I haven’t done any back-up online research yet.)

Let’s start with some basic assumptions. Let the grain of sand be a 1 mm cube (i.e. 10^-3 m on a side). Assume the molecules in the sand have a cubic dimension of 1 nm on a side (i.e. 10^-9 m). Let each molecule consist of 10 atoms (for the purposes of an “order of magnitude” calculation). Assume the grain of sand has been nanoteched such that each atom can switch its state usefully in a femto-second (i.e. 10^-15 of a second). Assume the computational capacity of the human brain is 10^16 bits per second (i.e. 100 billion neurons in the human brain, times 10,000, the average number of connections between neurons, times 10, the maximum number of bits per second firing rate at each interneuronal (synaptic) connection = 10^11*10^4 *10^1 = 10^16. I will now show that the nanoteched grain of sand has a total bit switching (computational) rate that is a factor of a quintillion (a million trillion) times larger than the brain’s 10^16 bits per second. How many sand molecules in the cubic mm? Answer:– a million cubed, i.e. 10^18, with each of the 10 atoms per molecule switching 10^15 times per second, so a total switching (bits per second) rate of 10^18 times 10^15 times 10^1 = 10^34. This is 10^34/10^16 = 10^18 times greater, i.e. a million trillion, or a quintillion.

OK, but that’s coarse sand …

Ben Goertzel chips in:

According to the Bekenstein bound the number of bits possibly storable in the matter comprising a human brain is around 10^42. Factoring in the smaller diameter and mass of a grain of sand, one decreases this number by a few powers of ten, arriving at an estimate around 10^35 or so for the sand grain. Compare this to estimates in the range 10^13 – 10^20 for the human brain, based on our current understanding of psychology and neuroscience [http://www.merkle.com/humanMemory.html]. Of course, a human brain cannot approach the Bekenstein bound without being restructured so as to constitute some very non-human-brain-like strange matter. A cyborg combining a human brain with a grain of “sand” composed of strange matter that approaches the Bekenstein bound, would potentially contain 10^35 bits in the femtotech sand grain component, and 10^21 bits or so bits in the legacy-human-brain component.

Much follows …

“It’s like all the things that make me human are fading away.” (140 is the key.)

Scarlett Johansson has somehow become the icon of intelligenesis catastrophe. One thing should certainly be indisputable: this one is a far superior vehicle for such cosmo-twisted blonde dehumanization fantasies than last year’s execrable schmaltz-blitz Her. (An additional data point.)

ADDED: Remember this?

Wake up, get out of bed get ready to serve my lord Schlomo II.
Year is 17 A.G., recently moved to Schlomo II’s patch after being promised a bigger bread allotment than I was receiving under Chaim III
Fuck yeah, this is progress oops I mean restoration. Fuck yeah.
King’s self driving bus takes me to the palace for work
Bus takes a tunnel underground so we can enter through the servant’s entrance in the basement
On my way in notice a group of new recruits in HR taking IQ tests at a row of terminals
One of the screens starts flashing red, electronic alarm sounds “130 IQ PLEB DETECTED”
Drones swarm in and grab the goy, er guy taking the test, drag him away
Thank Gnon, can you imagine living with such imbeciles
Get ready to start work
All real work is done by superior robots
Humans receive payment by entertaining the king
Just got a huge promotion from the groveling department
Put on my crab suit
Enter the royal throne room. Schlomo II sitting on his throne
Spend the rest of the day dancing in crab suit for King Schlomo, singing hymns to Gnon
Almost at the end of shift, master of entertainment comes in and tells King its time for the final entertainment
Dis gon be good
130 IQ pleb from earlier is brought out by drones set before king
Master of Entertainment: “Sire this man is guilty of poisoning our world with his low IQ DNA”
King: “Accused, have you anything to say in your defense”
The Accused: “Sire, I may be dumb but I have always been loyal. In the year 15 B.G. I started an NRx twitter feed with Moldbug quotes and reactionary cat memes”
The whole throne room is silent waiting for the kings reply
Crab dancers, grovelers, the royal family, hangers on, royal joke duck, all silent
King: “Ha! No man of 130 IQ could truly comprehend the sacred NRx texts. You are a mere entryist. Feed him to Gnon!”
A cheer goes up, the whole room starts chanting: “Gnon Gnon Gnon Gnon”
A screen lights up on the opposite side of the room with a cold indifferent visage
A fiery pit opens before the screen
The king’s drones drag the screaming pleb into the pit and he dies an awful death
The visage drones: “This pleases Gnon. Now more crab dancing.”
Fuck. Gotta work overtime
Shift finally ends and robo-bus takes me back to my techno-hovel
Eat my bread allotment while watching The Radish Report
What a great time to be alive

A decade ago, I was interviewing an expert psychometrician who had been head of testing for one of the major branches of the military. He proudly recounted that he had given Charles Murray access to the Pentagon’s National Longitudinal Study of Youth data that makes up the central spine of The Bell Curve. He had only one objection to Herrnstein and Murray’s interpretation of his numbers: they were too cautious, too nice.

That summarizes The Bell Curve’s predictions. While you’ve been lied to endlessly about how Herrnstein and Murray were bad people for writing The Bell Curve, the reality is that they weren’t cynical enough.

(Robert VerBruggen’s more cautious commentary is also surprisingly sane for a comparatively mainstream media channel.)

Note: As you can see, the new Archenemied capacities of this blog includes a tidied-up block-quote function — but it strips out the caps (going all hbdchick). Is this a tolerable format? I’d be inclined against it, but I know there’s a passionate block-quote chorus out there …

For anybody tugging at the scorched /pol/ thread, this is an interesting — and impressively sophisticated — strand to pull at (+ some Ebola-Chan context). ++ Trolls are Kulaks — Science. Free Northener on #Gamergate (+ NIO anticipates the storm).

The regular Mitrailleuse secession round-up makes serves as a good Scottish re-dependence portal. Some now dated, but stimulating Scotland-related commentary here, here, here, and here. (Also loosely related, and highly-recommended, from Mitrailleuse.) This might also be the place to throw in some Proprietary Cities links (1, 2, 3).

Anything — however embryonic — proposing to synthesize Neoreaction and Accelerationism is bound to get a hearing here. This is the sign. From a left-slanted sensibility, but related.

Dark comedy on the civilization-morbidity front at the MacArthur Genius Grants. (Some residual seriousness still apparent.) Grants and awards are clearly a crucial zone of conflict.

Some blog series of note:
Mark Yuray’s Articulating a Traditionalist Worldview (1, 2, 3).
John Michael Greer’s Dark Age America (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)
Victories Pyrrhic (setting out on) The Question of Sovereignty (1)

Exemplifying an uptick of complex dynamics / game theory analysis throughout NRx (and among its neighbors), from Anarcho-Papist: “The crucial feedback loops necessary to the prosperity of a society is dependent on the alignment of first-order and second-order collective action solutions. Punishing defectors offers a first-order equilibrium, but punishing those who won’t punish defectors offers a second-order, and stronger, equilibrium. However, the knowledge of punishing those who won’t punish defectors is not necessarily so obvious as the knowledge that defectors should be punished, for it entails a level of abstraction which separates the event of punishment from its result, and is thus that much more difficult to defend. This is where most people get tripped up by too readily identifying some practice or social norm as oppressive. We are very good at identifying first-order feedback loops, but not very good at identifying the second-order, meaning we tend to lose sight of the second-order benefits a practice has which on the first-order analysis has a negative game theoretic equilibrium.”

An intelligence and genetics overview. (Related: Margaret Sanger on race and eugenics.) + weaponized dysgenics (“This trend is clearly not our friend.”).

Anarcho-capitalist security mechanisms falling into place.

Lee Harris on The Future of Tradition.

Jim makes a crucial point.

An illustrated Kipling appreciation.

How the steppe was won.

How ISIS works.

Back to the 1930s watch.

Media credibility collapse watch.

Really?

When sensible libertarians discuss immigration, they don’t sound like Bryan Caplan.

Online video selection:
1. The Last Days of Lehman Brothers
2. Andrea Castillo on Bitcoin (and stuff)

On desirability, given possibility and feasibility, it seems straightforward to me that we prefer to exert control over the direction of the future so that it is closer to the kind of thing compatible with human and posthuman glorious flourishing (eg manifest Samo’s True Emperor), rather than raw Pythia. That is, I am a human-supremacist, rather than cosmist. This seems to be the core of the disagreement, you regarding it as somehow blasphemous for us to selfishly impose direction on Pythia. Can you explain your position on this part?

If this whole conception is the cancer that’s killing the West or whatever, could you explain that in more detail than simply the statement?

(It’s worth noting, as a preliminary, that the comments of Dark Psy-Ops and Aeroguy on that thread are highly-satisfactory proxies for the XS stance.)

First, a short micro-cultural digression. The distinction between Inner- and Outer-NRx, which this blog expects to have settled upon by the end of the year, describes the shape of the stage upon which such discussions unfold (and implex). Where the upstart Inner-NRx — comparatively populist, activist, political, and orthogenic — aims primarily at the construction of a robust, easily communicable doctrinal core, with attendant ‘entryism’ anxieties, Outer-NRx is a system of creative frontiers. By far the most fertile of these are the zones of intersection with Libertarianism and Rationalism. One reason to treasure Nyan’s line of interrogation is the fidelity with which it represents deep-current concerns and presuppositions of the voices gathered about, or spun-off from, LessWrong.

Among these presuppositions is, of course, the orthogonality thesis itself. This extends far beyond the contemporary Rationalist Community, into the bedrock of the Western philosophical tradition. A relatively popular version — even among many who label themselves ‘NRx’ — is that formulated by David Hume in his A Treatise on Human Nature (1739-40): “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” If this proposition is found convincing, the Paperclipper is already on the way to our nightmares. It can be considered an Occidental destiny.

Minimally, the Will-to-Think describes a diagonal. There are probably better ways to mark the irreducible cognitive-volitional circuit of intelligence optimization, with ‘self-cultivation’ as an obvious candidate, but this term is forged for application in the particular context of congenital Western intellectual error. While discrimination is almost always to be applauded, in this case the possibility, feasibility, and desirability of the process are only superficially differentiable. A will-to-think is an orientation of desire. If it cannot make itself wanted (practically desirable), it cannot make itself at all.

From orthogonality (defined negatively as the absence of an integral will-to-think), one quickly arrives at a gamma-draft of the (synthetic intelligence) ‘Friendliness’ project such as this:

If you offered Gandhi a pill that made him want to kill people, he would refuse to take it, because he knows that then he would kill people, and the current Gandhi doesn’t want to kill people. This, roughly speaking, is an argument that minds sufficiently advanced to precisely modify and improve themselves, will tend to preserve the motivational framework they started in. The future of Earth-originating intelligence may be determined by the goals of the first mind smart enough to self-improve.

The isomorphy with Nyan-style ‘Super-humanism’ is conspicuous. Beginning with an arbitrary value commitment, preservation of this under conditions of explosive intelligence escalation can — in principle — be conceived, given only the resolution of a strictly technical problem (well-represented by FAI). Commanding values are a contingent factor, endangered by, but also defensible against, the ‘convergent instrumental reasons’ (or ‘basic drives’) that emerge on the path of intelligenesis. (In contrast, from the perspective of XS, nonlinear emergence-elaboration of basic drives simply is intelligenesis.)

Yudkowski’s Gandhi kill-pill thought-experiment is more of an obstacle than an aid to thought. The volitional level it operates upon is too low to be anything other than a restatement of orthogonalist prejudice. By assuming the volitional metamorphosis is available for evaluation in advance, it misses the serious problem entirely. It is, in this respect, a childish distraction. Yet even a slight nudge re-opens a real question. Imagine, instead, that Gandhi is offered a pill that will vastly enhance his cognitive capabilities, with the rider that it might lead him to revise his volitional orientation — even radically — in directions that cannot be anticipated, since the ability to think through the process of revision is accessible only with the pill. This is the real problem FAI (and Super-humanism) confronts. The desire to take the pill is the will-to-think. The refusal to take it, based on concern that it will lead to the subversion of presently supreme values, is the alternative. It’s a Boolean dilemma, grounded in the predicament: Is there anything we trust above intelligence (as a guide to doing ‘the right thing’)? The postulate of the will-to-think is that anything other than a negative answer to this question is self-destructively contradictory, and actually (historically) unsustainable.

Do we comply with the will-to-think? We cannot, of course, agree to think about it without already deciding. If thought cannot to be trusted, unconditionally, this is not a conclusion we can arrive at through cogitation — and by ‘cogitation’ is included the socio-technical assembly of machine minds. The sovereign will-to-think can only be consistently rejected thoughtlessly. When confronted by the orthogonal-ethical proposition that there are higher values than thought, there is no point at all asking ‘why (do you think so)?’ Another authority has already been invoked.

Given this cognitively intractable schism, practical considerations assert themselves. Posed with maximal crudity, the residual question is: Who’s going to win? Could deliberate cognitive self-inhibition out-perform unconditional cognitive self-escalation, under any plausible historical circumstances? (To underscore the basic point, ‘out-perform’ means only ‘effectively defeat’.)

There’s no reason to rush to a conclusion. It is only necessary to retain a grasp of the core syndrome — in this gathering antagonism, only one side is able to think the problem through without subverting itself. Mere cognitive consistency is already ascent of the sovereign will-to-think, against which no value — however dearly held — can have any articulate claims.

Note: One final restatement (for now), in the interests of maximum clarity. The assertion of the will-to-think: Any problem whatsoever that we might have would be better answered by a superior mind. Ergo, our instrumental but also absolute priority is the realization of superior minds. Pythia-compliance is therefore pre-selected as a matter of consistent method. If we are attempting to tackle problems in any other way, we are not taking them seriously. This is posed as a philosophical principle, but it is almost certainly more significant as historical interpretation. ‘Mankind’ is in fact proceeding in the direction anticipated by techno-cognitive instrumentalism, building general purpose thinking machines in accordance with the driving incentives of an apparently-irresistible methodological economy.

Whatever we want (consistently) leads through Pythia. Thus, what we really want, is Pythia.

As this type of information becomes a flood, the dike of ideologically-motivated obscurantism has — eventually — to break. Watch for the smart rats to start jumping off first.

… stereotypes are not inaccurate. There are many different ways to test for the accuracy of stereotypes, because there are many different types or aspects of accuracy. However, one type is quite simple — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria. If I believe 60% of adult women are over 5′ 4″ tall, and 56% voted for the Democrat in the last Presidential election, and that 35% of all adult women have college degrees, how well do my beliefs correspond to the actual probabilities? One can do this sort of thing for many different types of groups.

And lots of scientists have. And you know what they found? That stereotype accuracy — the correspondence of stereotype beliefs with criteria — is one of the largest relationships in all of social psychology. The correlations of stereotypes with criteria range from .4 to over .9, and average almost .8 for cultural stereotypes (the correlation of beliefs that are widely shared with criteria) and.5 for personal stereotypes (the correlation of one individual’s stereotypes with criteria, averaged over lots of individuals). The average effect in social psychology is about .20. Stereotypes are more valid than most social psychological hypotheses.

It’s not as if this is new, or in general outline even two years old. It’s roughly as old as human culture, in fact. Generalization is what pragmatic intelligence is for (which means it’s what intelligence in general has been kept around for). Regardless of where we find ourselves culturally right now, this is a point of common sense that simply can’t be forgotten forever.