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LessWrong
''LessWrong'' (also written ''Less Wrong'') is a community blog and Internet forum, forum focused on discussion of cognitive biases, philosophy, psychology, economics, rationality, and artificial intelligence, among other topics. It is associated with the rationalist community. Purpose LessWrong describes itself as an online forum and community aimed at improving human reasoning, rationality, and decision-making, with the goal of helping its users hold more accurate beliefs and achieve their personal objectives. The best known posts of ''LessWrong'' are "The Sequences", a series of essays which aim to describe how to avoid the typical failure modes of human reasoning with the goal of improving decision-making and the evaluation of evidence. One suggestion is the use of Bayes' theorem as a decision-making tool. There is also a focus on psychological barriers that prevent good decision-making, including fear conditioning and List of cognitive biases, cognitive biases that have be ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rationalist Community
The rationalist community is a 21st century movement that formed around a group of internet blogs, primarily LessWrong and Astral Codex Ten (formerly known as Slate Star Codex). The movement initially gained prominence in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its members seek to use rationality to avoid cognitive biases. Common interests include transhumanism, statistics, effective altruism, and mitigating existential risk from artificial general intelligence. Beliefs The community began with a simple idea: "Each day, we aim to be less wrong about the world than the day before." They refer to rationality as the art of thinking in ways that result in accurate beliefs and good decisions. Public perception and media coverage focus on the group's use of Bayesian inference, which some adherents claim is the "least imperfect" way to think. Tara Burton wrote in ''The New Atlantis (journal), The New Atlantis'': "Central to the rationalist worldview was the idea that nothing — not social niceti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eliezer Yudkowsky
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky ( ; born September 11, 1979) is an American artificial intelligence researcher and writer on decision theory and ethics, best known for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence. He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion influenced philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book '' Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies''. Work in artificial intelligence safety Goal learning and incentives in software systems Yudkowsky's views on the safety challenges future generations of AI systems pose are discussed in Stuart Russell's and Peter Norvig's undergraduate textbook '' Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach''. Noting the difficulty of formally specifying general-purpose goals by hand, Russell and Norvig cite Yudkowsky's proposal that autonomous and adaptive systems ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Slate Star Codex
''Astral Codex Ten'' (ACX), formerly ''Slate Star Codex'' (SSC), is a blog focused on science, medicine (especially psychiatry), philosophy, politics, and futurism. The blog is written by Scott Alexander Siskind, a San Francisco Bay Area psychiatrist, under the pen name Scott Alexander. ''Slate Star Codex'' was launched in 2013 and was discontinued on June 23, 2020. , the blog is partially back online, with the content restored but commenting disabled. The successor blog, ''Astral Codex Ten'', was launched on January 21, 2021. Alexander also blogged at the rationalist community blog ''LessWrong'', and wrote a fiction book in blog format named ''Unsong''. A revised version of ''Unsong'' was published on May 24, 2024. Content The site was a primary venue of the rationalist community and also attracted wider audiences. The ''New Statesman'' characterizes it as "a nexus for the rationalist community and others who seek to apply reason to debates about situations, ideas, and mor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rationality
Rationality is the quality of being guided by or based on reason. In this regard, a person acts rationally if they have a good reason for what they do, or a belief is rational if it is based on strong evidence. This quality can apply to an ability, as in a rational animal, to a psychological process, like reasoning, to mental states, such as beliefs and intentions, or to persons who possess these other forms of rationality. A thing that lacks rationality is either ''arational'', if it is outside the domain of rational evaluation, or '' irrational'', if it belongs to this domain but does not fulfill its standards. There are many discussions about the essential features shared by all forms of rationality. According to reason-responsiveness accounts, to be rational is to be responsive to reasons. For example, dark clouds are a reason for taking an umbrella, which is why it is rational for an agent to do so in response. An important rival to this approach are coherence-based ac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robin Hanson
Robin Dale Hanson (born August 28, 1959) is an American economist and author. He is associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a former research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. Hanson is known for his work on idea futures and markets, and he was involved in the creation of the Foresight Institute's Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He invented market scoring rules like LMSR ( Logarithmic Market Scoring Rule) used by prediction markets such as Consensus Point (where Hanson is Chief Scientist), and has conducted research on signalling. He also proposed the Great Filter hypothesis. Background Hanson received a BS in physics from the University of California, Irvine in 1981, an MS in physics and an MA in Conceptual Foundations of Science from the University of Chicago in 1984, and a PhD in social science from Caltech in 1997 for his thesis titled ''Four puzzles in information and politics: Product bans, i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Guardian Media Group, owned by the Scott Trust Limited. The trust was created in 1936 to "secure the financial and editorial independence of ''The Guardian'' in perpetuity and to safeguard the journalistic freedom and liberal values of ''The Guardian'' free from commercial or political interference". The trust was converted into a limited company in 2008, with a constitution written so as to maintain for ''The Guardian'' the same protections as were built into the structure of the Scott Trust by its creators. Profits are reinvested in its journalism rather than distributed to owners or shareholders. It is considered a newspaper of record in the UK. The editor-in-chief Katharine Viner succeeded Alan Rusbridger in 2015. S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Transhumanism
Transhumanism is a philosophical and intellectual movement that advocates the human enhancement, enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available new and future technologies that can greatly enhance longevity, cognition, and well-being. Transhumanist thinkers study the potential benefits and dangers of emerging technologies that could overcome fundamental human limitations, as well as the technoethics, ethics of using such technologies. Some transhumanists speculate that human beings may eventually be able to transform themselves into beings of such vastly greater abilities as to merit the label of posthuman#Transhumanism, posthuman beings. Another topic of transhumanist research is how to protect humanity against existential risks from Existential risk from artificial general intelligence, artificial general intelligence, asteroid impact, gray goo, high-energy particle collision experiments, natural or synthetic pandemic, and nuclear warfare. The ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Existential Risk
A global catastrophic risk or a doomsday scenario is a hypothetical event that could damage human well-being on a global scale, endangering or even destroying Modernity, modern civilization. Existential risk is a related term limited to events that could cause full-blown human extinction or permanently and drastically curtail humanity's existence or potential. In the 21st century, a number of academic and non-profit organizations have been established to research global catastrophic and existential risks, formulate potential mitigation measures, and either advocate for or implement these measures. Definition and classification Defining global catastrophic risks The term global catastrophic risk "lacks a sharp definition", and generally refers (loosely) to a risk that could inflict "serious damage to human well-being on a global scale". Humanity has suffered large catastrophes before. Some of these have caused serious damage but were only local in scope—e.g. the Black ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Futures Studies
Futures studies, futures research or futurology is the systematic, interdisciplinary and holistic study of social and technological advancement, and other environmental trends, often for the purpose of exploring how people will live and work in the future. Predictive techniques, such as forecasting, can be applied, but contemporary futures studies scholars emphasize the importance of systematically exploring alternatives. In general, it can be considered as a branch of the social sciences and an extension to the field of history. Futures studies (colloquially called "futures" by many of the field's practitioners) seeks to understand what is likely to continue and what could plausibly change. Part of the discipline thus seeks a systematic and pattern-based understanding of past and present, and to explore the possibility of future events and trends. Unlike the physical sciences where a narrower, more specified system is studied, futurology concerns a much bigger and more comp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Technological Singularity
The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's #Intelligence explosion, intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of successive Recursive self-improvement, self-improvement cycles; more intelligent generations would appear more and more rapidly, causing a rapid increase ("explosion") in intelligence that culminates in a powerful superintelligence, far surpassing all human intelligence.Vinge, Vernor"The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era", in ''Vision-21: Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering in the Era of Cyberspace'', G. A. Landis, ed., NASA Publication CP-10129, pp. 11–22, 1993. - "There may be developed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The New York Observer
''The New York Observer'' was a weekly newspaper established in 1987. In 2016, it ceased print publication and became the online-only newspaper ''Observer''. The media site focuses on culture, real estate, media, politics and the entertainment and publishing industries. History The ''Observer'' was first published in New York City on September 22, 1987, as a weekly alternative newspaper by Arthur L. Carter, a former investment banker. The ''New York Observer'' had also been the title of an earlier weekly religious paper founded 164 years before by Sidney E. Morse in 1823. After almost two decades, in July 2006, the paper was purchased by the American real estate figure Jared Kushner, then only 25 years old. The paper began its life as a broadsheet, and was then printed in tabloid format every Wednesday, and currently has an exclusively online format on an internet website. It is headquartered at 1 Whitehall Street in lower Manhattan. Previous prominent writers for the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
