[tt] [wta-talk] Programmers and politics

[Eugen Leitl]

----- Forwarded message from Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net> -----

From: Jef Allbright <jef at jefallbright.net>
Date: Thu, 24 May 2007 11:16:50 -0700
To: World Transhumanist Association Discussion List <wta-talk at transhumanism.org>
Subject: Re: [wta-talk] Programmers and politics
Reply-To: World Transhumanist Association Discussion List <wta-talk at transhumanism.org>

Eliezer -

I remember trying to talk with you about this concept almost two years
ago on the outside patio at SAP the night before the Accelerating
Change 2006 conference.  It was both frustrating and amusing.  You
ignored my words, and suggested that I might consider the Way of
"Beizu-tsukai" and then condescendingly explained the term, without
any receptivity for the fact that I speak conversational Japanese and
am quite comfortable with Bayes.

I tried again, saying I would like to share some thinking with you
about the value of archetypes for building a framework for acquiring
new concepts.  Again you seemed not to hear my words, and
condescendingly referred me to Robin Dawes' work on heuristics and
biases -- without any receptivity for the fact that I had already read
Dawes and actually had an electronic version in my pocket at that
moment (along with Kahneman and Tverksy) who's work I prefer.

Despite the lack of meaningful communication, that conversation was
most enlightening. ;-) I share some of your concern for cognitive
gaps, but would suggest that you are quite dangerously blind to some
of your own.

Regarding your suggestion that some people lack the "mental gear for
programming", I would suggest that there are two distinct layers to
this problem:

First, studies show that fewer than two thirds of adults, and nearly
half of college students don't effectively reach Piaget's cognitive
stage of "formal operative" reasoning. Of the 50% of college students,
most of these must be in the humanities side since you simply can't do
advanced math, physics or science without this capacity. [Note that
this does not imply that nearly all students in the humanities lack
this capacity.  Does anyone have numbers for the proportion of
students on each side of CP Snow's Great Divide?]

Second, back to the archetypes, even those who think in formal
operative terms may lack the conceptual archetypes for iteration,
exponentiation, recursion, context, inheritance, sub-classing, Shannon
information, algorithmic complexity, synergy, probability, and related
conceptual tools necessarily encountered in programming but applicable
over a much wider domain including evolutionary processes in biology
and society.

Like Aesop's fables teaching archetypes of the social world, wouldn't
it be useful to have a child-friendly set of stories teaching
archetypes of the physical/informational world?  All children should
become familiar with iteration (a journey of a thousand miles begins
with a single step),  exponentiation (what bunnies do, the grains of
rice on the chessboard), recursion (trees, seashells, fractals,
meta-examples, meta-meta-examples..), context (illusions, paradox),
synergy (divided we fall, united we stand, but not just in the social
domain), and so on, so that these archetypes become internalized and
integrated forming a mental framework for more effective complex
thinking.  Where is /this/ collection of children's stories?

We're going to delegate more and more of our complex "thinking" to
machines, and that specifically includes the domain currently known as
"politics", but there's a lot of conceptual middle-ware yet to
develop.  I look forward to the eventual day when SIAI embraces rather
than summarily dismisses human cognitive enhancement as an essential
piece of the plan for promotion of humanities evolving values.

- Jef
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----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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