Xuepolis
Main - About Me - Downloads - Essays - Poetry - Reviews - Stories - Miscellaneous
General essays
| Don't touch the book! | Or actually, do touch it. Right now. (Tongue in cheek) |
| For those feeling depressed... | ...about not being good at anything. |
Copyright
| My views about copyright | What it says. My views are currently pretty radical, but hopefully they won't be for long. |
| Copyright: the Societal Side | Looks closer at the social effects of copyright, the necessary choice between civil liberties and copyright, and the possible effects of abolishing copyright. I recommend reading this one first. |
Futurism and transhumanism
| 14 objections against AI/Friendly AI/The Singularity answered | What it says. Though if you are not aware of the topic from before, I recommend starting from "Why care about artificial intelligence". |
| Artificial intelligence Within our lifetime? No idle speculation | I think there's a non-trivial chance for us to develop artificial intelligence within our lifetime. And that is a thing which definitely deserves some attention. |
| In defense of Transhuman development | People often confuse technological and political possibility. In this I argue that just because something important might be achievable today, it doesn't mean we shouldn't rather concentrate on future technologies that could make the same job easier. |
| Transhumanism: Happiness, Equality, Choice | If you are wondering what transhumanism is, or why it's important, or why you should care, then read this. |
| Why care about artificial intelligence? | So, AI might be developed within our lifetime, but why should anybody care? True artificial intelligence might actually be the number one thing in the world you should care about. |
| Why I worry about the future | As I see it, the chance of humanity not surviving the near future seems pretty high. |
Peer-reviewed work
| Evolved altruism, ethical complexity, anthropomorphic trust: three factors misleading estimates of the safety of artificial general intelligence. |
Presented at the 7th European Conference on Computing and Philosophy (ECAP 2009) on July 4, 2009. |
Posted on LessWrong
| What is Bayesianism? | At its core, Bayesianism as a philosophy is something that seems blindingly obvious once you get it. In practice, however, humans often fail to apply its basic principles. |
| Levels of communication | Communication fails when people aren't talking about the same thing. One way for this to happen is when you operate on entirely different levels of communication, of which I discuss the levels of facts, status, values, and socialization. |
| Intuitive differences: when to agree to disagree | Discussions may also fail if the participants have differing intuitions underlying their arguments. Identifying such differences helps recognize situations when it's best to agree to disagree. |
| Pain and gain motivation | Pain and gain motivation seem to be two fundamental causes driving our behavior, but they are often confused with each other. |
| Ethics as a black box function | Our ethics is three-tiered. There are the things we imagine we consider right, the things we consider right, and the things we actually do. |
| It's okay to be (a little) irrational | Recognizing that it's alright to be irrational helps us become rational. (Replace "irrational/rational" with any other vice/virtue pair, if you wish.) |
| You cannot be mistaken about (not) wanting to wirehead | It is important to recognize that pleasure and want are two separate things, and one does not necessarily lead to the other. Also, wireheading is less well-defined as people seem to think. |
For more of my writing, I suggest taking a look at my LiveJournal - nearly all of the writings that end up here are posted there first, though the ones on this page might be slightly more refined. On the other hand, a lot of the potentially good ones never make the cut here, either because my standards are high or because I'm too lazy to move them.