The results are in from Less Wrong’s poll by Yvain. Of note:

Of 128 of us who wanted to talk about our moral theories, 94 (73.4%) were consequentialists, about evenly split between garden-variety or Eliezer-variety (many complained they didn’t know what Eliezer’s interpretation was, or what the generic interpretation was, or that all they knew was that they were consequentialists). 15 (9%) said with more or fewer disclaimers that they were basically deontologists, and 5 (3.9%) wrote-in virtue ethics, and objected to their beliefs being left out (sorry!). 14 people (10.9%) didn’t believe in morality.

(bold added) We’re here! We care about stuff! Get used to it!

I wonder if those who answered that they “don’t believe in morality” mean the same thing by this statement that I would. Which is to say, they can’t possibly, because being an ethical nihilist is inconsistent for humans.

Yesterday (Tuesday, March 10, 2009) I gave a lecture at the SCSU Philosophy Department entitled, “On the Imminent Robot Uprising”. Sadly, it was not recorded (I must remember to not let that happen again) but here is a rough transcript, written in a very informal style. I tend to ad-lib a lot and use feedback from the audience to determine how in-depth I should get, and the first bit about military robots just said “say some stuff about military robots” on my notes. It helps being something of a domain expert when doing these things.

Also, I’m kindof sad that I don’t have a transcript of the following discussion (mostly me fielding questions) - I deliberately brushed over some of the philosophical questions in the talk since I knew we would have an interesting discussion about them after.

The images below are my slides; none of them were created by me, except the brief bit of editing I did to the ‘theater metaphor’ GWT image to add things about cats. As this is an academic paper, they’re being used under ‘fair use’; if you own it and disagree, I’ll take it down. Sources should be obvious.

Robots are depicted in movies as a technology that can “slip the leash” and wreak havoc upon humankind. How likely is this scenario? What sort of risk do robots represent? Is this scenario inevitable with respect to all varieties of robotics technology? (Note, Bayesian readers, that I am not a fan of Bayesian reasoning, and neither were those in the audience, so read claims about ‘probability’ with a grain of salt.)

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This post attempts to summarize some things about social media for the uninitiated. I will talk about social media in general, and focus on the different ways people use Twitter.

Of course, other people have already done most of the footwork. Please check out this post by Fred Cavazza, paying particular attention to the image of his taxonomy. Also note this essay by Paul Graham, which highlights the role of social media in the lives of those who use it.

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I haven’t posted anything in a while. Part of this is, “If you don’t have anything awesome to say, don’t say anything at all”. But also I’ve been very busy. You can follow my day-to-day on Twitter, but here are some general things you might be interested in:

I’m working on a review of Moral Machines for the journal Minds and Machines. Wallach and Allen have a book-related blog. My deadline is like, today or something.

I had the chance to talk to Scaz about my research. It was awesome. I can’t post a transcript here due to my university’s ridiculous views on privacy and human research ethics, but I’ll probably talk about it soon.

I will be giving a guest lecture for the SCSU Philosophy Dept this coming Tuesday (March 10) at 3:15 PM. The topic is going to be robots, more specifically the inevitability of a robot uprising. Hope to see you there.

The folks who do Overcoming Bias have a new site called Less Wrong, which is reddit-てき. You should go there if only to check out the site design. It’s pretty neat. I post as thomblake.

EDIT: fixed date for SCSU talk

Averaging student grades doesn’t make much sense to me. A lot could be seriously written on the subject, but this post will just be a little rantish. (Note: A lot of my specific arguments here are inspired by Ken Gatzke)

Let us suppose that your class has 5 graded papers, all of approximately the same length and importance. Now consider 2 students, Andy and Ben. Andy gets the grades A B C D F on his papers, while Ben gets the grades F D C B A. If you average their grades, they will roughly come out to a C (assuming the F was within a reasonable range). However, the grades tell entirely different stories about the two students. While there’s no necessary connection between a set of grades and a particular story, let me stipulate some stories to drive home the point.

Andy did well in his previous class in the subject and understood the introductory material very well. However, he gained absolutely nothing from the experience of this class. The further the material drifted from what he already understood, the worse he did. Ben, on the other hand, started out with no background in the subject whatsoever. However, over the course of the semester through hard work and perseverance he came to understand the subject completely.

Now, what would be the justification for giving each of these students a C? It seems to me that by these accounts, Andy deserves an F and Ben an A. And while these are not the stories of most students, Andy and Ben are sure to eventually fall victim to this unjust grading scheme if it persists.

Obviously, resolving this problem would require examining what grades are supposed to do, as well as how to make them do that. As that would be a much longer rant, I’ll do the usual philosophical thing and leave the reader with a criticism and some questions - answers are left as an exercise.

This post is a follow-up to my previous post, Video Games Encourage Concern For Your Character in which I challenge Don Gotterbarn’s Ethicomp 2008 abstract. As I noted before, this isn’t exactly fair, as abstracts are often written without much of an editorial process, and (Don has since confirmed) the paper was not yet written at that time. So I endeavor here to provide a more thorough appraisal of the full paper, conveniently available in the proceedings of Ethicomp(1).

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The public debate over abortion rights has a long history, with seemingly intractable differences. Some of the most common arguments on both sides have obvious flaws that I won’t belabor here. However, once we get past the bad arguments, there are still two points of view that deserve defending, and there are good arguments for both points of view:

1. Abortion is bad (wrong / immoral), therefore one shouldn’t have an abortion.

2. Abortion is permissible (my choice / none of your business), therefore abortion should be legal.

From the form of this, it should be apparent that there is no contradiction here. Consider:

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It is about this time of year that I traditionally start to reflect on my life and where it’s going. It’s the beginning of July, and today is the holiday of “Birthday”, the time of year that we celebrate our coming into the world. The date for the holiday was chosen to logically break up the year, so that gift-giving holidays occur in the Winter and Summer, and consumption holidays occur in the Spring and Fall. This holiday was proposed some years ago by Isaac Schlueter, who coincidentally has his own birthday on the same day.

Isaac recently wrote a post reflecting on his experience as a programmer and the difficulty of becoming an expert. Apparently, it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to master anything.

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The following is a web adaptation of a paper I wrote for a seminar on epistemology. I think this idea has the potential to revolutionize epistemology in the 21st century - maybe I’ll write a better paper about it later.

The discipline of cybernetics, created in the 1940’s by Norbert Wiener, is the science of information processing systems. Recent developments in cybernetic technology have given us reason to re-evaluate the way we think about knowledge. This is because knowledge is certainly related in some way to information. However, I do not think it has been made clear in exactly what way they are related. When I sit down at a computer with access to the internet, I feel smarter; I am able to answer questions that I would never be able to otherwise, with very little effort on my part. One likely explanation of this phenomenon is that I am somehow more knowledgeable when I am sitting at a computer. But this does not fit into the usual conception of knowledge; I doubt that sitting down at a computer automatically changes any beliefs of mine, nor does it justify them. This leads me to think that there should be a theory of knowledge that allows for this kind of thing to be called knowledge. Generally, I believe that a claim to knowledge is a claim to a certain competence; it is commonly said that knowledge is power, and “power” is often used analogously with other types of competence. I intend to show that a claim to knowledge (in the sense of knowledge about the world) is a claim to have access to information.

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I had started to write this as an academic paper several years ago. It never got finished, so I’ve slightly rewritten it for the web. Enjoy.

The issue of same-sex marriage oft gets bandied about in the public forum. People are essentially arguing over whether marriage is a legal right, and whether marriage should be defined as a union between one man and one woman. The issues involving “gay marriage” are addressed fairly well (in a rather one-sided fashion) by Scott Bidstrup in Gay Marriage: The Arguments and the Motives. But the question that has not been sufficiently addressed is why marriage is a legal institution, and more importantly whether it should continue to be. I intend to demonstrate that marriage should not be an institution of the state, specifically in the US.

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