Common Sense Atheism

This is part of the problem. A p-value of 0.05 absolutely does not (!!!) indicate 95% confidence in the results! What a p-value means is, if the hypothesis in question is false, then we have an x% chance of seeing the observed data. It tells you absolutely nothing about, if you observe such-and-such data, then how strongly should we believe the hypothesis.

For example, you could have an extremely unlikely hypothesis (eg. "dice are controlled by alien telepathy"), test it, and still come out with p < 0.05 because of something much more plausible ("the dice were badly made and are biased"). This is known as the base rate fallacy; an extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. Moreover, to prove an extraordinary claim, you must show it is more likely not just compared to chance, but compared to every less extraordinary alternative, including "the experimenters are faking the data".

It's also entirely possible to get a result at p < 0.05 that makes the hypothesis you're testing less likely. Suppose you want to know how far away the nearest star is. The value in the textbook is 13.4 light-years, and you think it's really 12,000. You take some measurements, and get values of 19.6, 17.4, 20.1, 20.4 and 18.5.

Now, this is a significant result at p < 0.05 - if the star is 13.4 light-years away, then getting these numbers has a probability of less than 5%. However, these results completely rule out the hypothesis you're testing. The numbers you get are pretty unlikely if the…

Oh, no doubt. I have long ago realized that from a psychological point of view, it is purely axiomatic whether to "have faith" or not, and is primarily a factor of one's upbringing. Unlike formal systems, the brain has no need for internal logical consistency. (And it could be argued that many religious systems are internally consistent given you accept their axioms; in which case there is absolutely no hope of resolving the argument without appealing to Bayesian inference and noting that my choice of axioms is a better fit for the evidence, but this is a very subtle point to grasp. For example, read the story of Luke Muehlhauser, who read mountains of philosophy and theology and in the end was only convinced by the dissonance in historical evidence for Jesus, an implicitly Bayesian argument: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?page_id=3)

Another nice argument is by Occam's razor, that the scientific choice of axioms has less complexity and is devoid of localization, whereas systems like Catholicism have strong focus on arbitrary notions like Jerusalem or sacristy. These arbitrary notions are explained on-the-nose by evolutionary thinking (our ancestors made up stories because of their psychology), whereas they are inexplicable in Catholic thinking. (Why did Jesus choose to come alive when did? He just picked a time and place at random.) Of course, Occam's razor is only an aesthetic choice that agrees with evidence, again a Bayesian argument. It's difficult to base one's life…

Undervaluing Wittgenstein isn't really consistent with what I've read in American philosophy at least. If you go by objective metrics (which would be the Moneyball approach), he consistently tops the citation counts, and beyond that, is considered central to many areas. Probably only Heidegger gives him a run for most broadly influential 20th-century philosopher (though it's hard to compare directly, because they've been influential on quite different groups).

He's been particularly influential on analytic philosophy via Saul Kripke, among other interpreters. In popularity contests, he routinely gets voted #1 most influential philosopher in polls of academic philosophers as well, e.g. in a 1999 poll of mostly UK/US academic philosophers (http://commonsenseatheism.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Lackey-What-are-the-modern-classics.pdf) and in a Brian Leiter straw poll (http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/03/so-who-is-the-most-important-philosopher-of-the-past-200-years.html). The former one concludes that Philosophical Investigations is "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations".

An interesting question might be who is undervalued on those lists: is there someone halfway down, or not on the list at all, who should be near the top?

In this case it's a difference in levels of understanding. From the beginning of the article: "I never strongly understood the command beyond the handful of specific use cases that I needed it for." So in that frame of mind git-reset is very simple. "Oh crap, I messed up my working dir and everything's messed up! git-reset --hard!"

The purpose of the article though is to improve understanding beyond that and at an intuitive level. It's the difference between saying Bayes Theorem is p(h|e,c) = p(e|h,c)*p(h|c)/p(e|c) and linking to http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=13156

The thing I like about git is that yes, as a whole it's pretty complicated, but it's really not that hard to get up and running quickly especially if you use github. Then it's a gift that keeps on giving as you learn more about it while also becoming more proficient. Kind of like vim in a way, which is notorious for its wall of a learning curve, but if you just want to treat it as a normal text editor you can tell it to start up in insert mode and use gvim, then proceed to learn from there.

The issue isn't "evil AI". Very few people in the transhumanist/AI movement are concerned about evil AIs. The issue is that unless we are very careful to engineer an AI that cares about human values it's going to be completely indifferent to human values. Indifference is the enemy, evil is not.

To illustrate, consider the African Elephant. After it reaches 40 to 60 its teeth fall out and it slowly dies in agony from starvation. This is not because nature is evil or because natural selection is evil. This sort of thing just happens because nature is completely indifferent to human values. An AI, just like a process like natural selection, is just not going to care about humans unless we get it right. And since we have only one attempt to get it right, the stakes are so absurdly high.

Anyway, the guys at LessWrong have put a great deal of thought into these issues. If you're interested in this sort of thing, check out the sequences[1]. It's a few million words, but it has a terrific ratio of text to insight.

[1] http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=12774

You raise good points. In fact, that is the very problem of so-called "Friendly" AI. Note the capital F. It's a confusing term, I know, but the basic idea is an AI that "does what we want", in the most general sense. The idea behind FAi is the exact idea you present here.

The point is that it is a bad idea to just throw together an AI and hope that it is friendly (lower case f), but rather the big important problem of our time is to generate a mathematical model of Friendliness, so that we can explicitly define to the AI how we don't want all the bad things you mentioned or any other besides.

[Edit] Here are some relevant links:

http://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf

http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=14047

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/08/a-nice-and-meaty-introduction-to-friendly-ai/