Reddit reviews Rationality: From AI to Zombies

You could directly apply at SpaceX, they also need business people (and they're the company with the explicit goal of putting 1 million people on Mars before the end of the century). Also potentially of interest: r/colonizemars

Also also, I recommend (a bit randomly) this book which is mostly about how to think better but also contains a lot about how to ensure humanity has a successful future and what that actually entails.

It is from this book: Rationality: From AI to Zombies which is an edited collection of the authors essays.

You may be correct (and I believe he did turn them into a book). Still, even so, "read the Sequences" sounds exponentially more creepy than "read Plato's Republic," no?

> she can't deny certain things that she's felt

That was where I was for years. I knew there were problems, but I was holding on to feelings from the past.

Then, I got on a kick (unrelated to church stuff) reading about cognition, sociology, psychology, rationality, etc and I put together a set of concepts and realized that it added up to my experiences being based on all of that rather than a spirit telling me something was true.

In that second I stopped believing.

This playlist has a bunch of the psychology stuff

[This book](http://www.amazon.com/Rationality-AI-Zombies-Eliezer-Yudkowsky-ebook/dp/B00ULP6EW2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1426482361&sr=8-1&keywords=from+ai+to+zombies has a) collection of good rationality tools.

I don't categorize 'em like that as I read 'em, but Dataclysm, Rationality; from AI to Zombies, Everything Bad is Good For You, Country Driving, Freakonomics, and The Mathematics of Love are all 'thinky' nonfiction books I've recommended recently because I've retained new ideas and methods from them. In addition, nearly every essay written by DFW is successfully grist for my mill (even the ones about tennis, a subject I would have to work at caring less about.)

I stuck with nonfiction because even that feels a bit overwhelming. Fiction is too much for me right now; I really enjoyed and recently quoted from The Bell Jar, for instance, but what I got from the book was life-affirming and sensual and I have friends who got vastly divergent or even contrary methods (and I also got some solid advice that I'll take to heart if I ever decide to commit suicide.)

Edit: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest makes me want to watch the movie too, now. The book was not what I expected and was more engaging for all that, but also depressing. Set in an asylum. Read it because of a reference in a recent Neal Stevenson book, and because I'd been meaning to for some time.

> Think Fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman, this would be the place to start, he is essentially the father of the study of cognitive biases

I came to recommend that. It's pretty readable, though I don't recall it having a big focus on personal insight and growth.

Another one is the LessWrong Sequences by Eliezer Yudkowsky, that does cover some similar material (and other); a big chunk of it has been edited and published as the book Rationality: From AI to Zombies (which I haven't read; I read the original sequences). It's pretty well-written, fun, grounded in science and is more focused on "personal insight and growth"; not everybody likes his style tho.

Of course - but if you keep asking "what is the evidence?" and "how do you know that?" you will get there. To say that there is not much difference between an irrational and a rational process is just nonsense.

It is not as if this stuff is a big secret http://www.amazon.com.au/Rationality-From-Zombies-Eliezer-Yudkowsky-ebook/dp/B00ULP6EW2

Have you read HPMOR or Rationality: AI to Zombies? Might help.

You have a moral worth and value as a human being beyond your intelligence and work ethic. Being smart and productive makes you useful to a capitalistic society, but you don't need to be useful in order to have a right to exist. You don't have to continually prove your worthiness or value. The idea that you have to is super toxic.

Those qualities might make you better able to help people (perhaps by helping with the Value Alignment Problem). If so, you should take advantage of the fact; if the fast-takeoff theories of AI are correct, you are living in the time between us identifying the value alignment problem and it being too late to do anything about it. Living in this time, we have a chance to shape the future of humanity; to save it, or destroy it, depending on whether or not we solve value alignment or not. Or, if the hard takeoff theory is wrong, then you probably don't have much to worry about, research will be the last thing to be replaced.

And if you help successfully shepherd humanity through a hard AI takeoff, you can retire afterwards fully confident in your contributions to the human race.

Even if it turns out that's not where your talents lie, there is a lot of suffering in the world right now, and no automation here to save us all yet.

More likely, though, you will eventually have to adjust the way that you value yourself and derive your self-esteem. I planned on going into research; in retrospect, not because I wanted to, but because it seemed like the thing to do. Turned out I suck at research; I spent a couple of years depressed in a PhD program, escaped with a Masters, taught for a bit, and then went out and got a programming job. And man, it turns out that being intelligent isn't worth jack flipping squat if you don't do anything with it. And I enjoy building and improving software way the heck more than toiling in a lab all day, especially when I get to hear the people using the software thank me for making their lives easier. It still aches a bit that I didn't finish the PhD; some part of me still wants to prove how smart I am. Getting paid a bunch of money is it's form of respect, and I'm way happier now. It was extremely not fun at the time, though.

On a more mundane note, I really don't expect anyone to automate away programming or research any time soon, and as a former cell biology student and programmer, I think Elon Musk underestimates how hard getting real utility out of neural laces is going to be by at least an order of magnitude.

No it is not. There is a significant probability that the person breaking into your house isn't a murderer, but will startle and shoot you if approached. Or kill you for some other reason. It is stupid to believe that you can just shoo a burglar out of your house unarmed. If there is someone stealing your stuff that might find and kill you, or kill you if you approach them, you do the sensible thing and don't take chances. You really are not appreciating the situation.

Think. You are in your house, listening as a man rummages through your stuff downstairs. He might have a gun. Eventually he grunts in frustration and goes up the stairs, thinking no one's home. He approaches. He's almost found you. You have a gun. Do you a. Lie in wait and shoot him, b. Try to shout and startle him into leaving, c. Threaten him, or d. Start talking calmly and politely.

Answer: a. Any of the others has a significant risk of him startling and shooting you dead.

As an aside, you might want to read the book Rationality: From AI to Zombies. You can get it at amazon for $5, or here for free but with a bit more hassle.

This is the post that got me banned from /r/SamHarris due to breaking rule 3 in that subreddit regarding relevance to Sam Harris.

I'll to to make my case on why I think it is relevant:

Sam is a big proponent of rationality. Specifically, this is a theorem that Eliezer Yudkowsky, a guest in Sam's podcast is a big proponent off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaNLX71Hl88 <---Link to relevant Podcast

Relevant book:

https://smile.amazon.com/Rationality-AI-Zombies-Eliezer-Yudkowsky-ebook/dp/B00ULP6EW2/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&qid=1426182905&sr=8-9

Your comment was automatically spamfiltered, presumably because of the Amazon link with the referrer tag. If you edit the comment to use the plain referrer-free Amazon link, I can reapprove it.

https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-AI-Zombies-Eliezer-Yudkowsky-ebook/dp/B00ULP6EW2

Good book that discusses topic of AI and it's a cat to our ird

Rationality from AI to Zombies and Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky are both free on-line, though you can get both of them as ebooks [here](https://www.amazon.com/Rationality-AI-Zombies-Eliezer-Yudkowsky-ebook/dp/B00ULP6EW2] and here, as well as hardcopies of the latter here.

Rationality from AI to Zombies is a high-resolution overview of both the theory and practice of how to have a more accurate model of reality ("epistemic rationality") and how to be more personally effective ("instrumental rationality"). It focuses mostly on the former.

Inadequate Equilibria is about how society gets things wrong and what beating the odds on that looks like.

Discrete Mathematics - Ross and Wright. Once you get into it, this shit is amazing. Epiphanies for days.

The Language Instinct - Stephen Pinker - an utterly fascinating book on language and the brain, chock full of 'well, shit' moments. He's also written a bunch more equally fascinating books - The Blank Slate and How The Mind Works being among them.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies This is a collection of essays on cognitive biases, fallacies and how to kid yourself that you're avoiding them. It will make your brain hurt.

The Philospher's Toolkit - Julin Baggini - a kind of cliff-notes introduction to a wide range of concepts in philosophy