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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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We can't imagine what a 200 IQ genius would be like. Imagine a group of 8-year-olds had you locked in a jail cell and were told if they let you out you would kill them. Do you think you could eventually convince the kids to release you? Also, there will be a line of humans trying to help the 200 IQ genius out of the tank.

Someone here mentioned Terence Tao had an IQ of 230. I found that dubious, but a quick Google showed me that it's actually true.

So for the analogy to work we need to ramp up the numbers. But I agree with the gist of it myself.

230 IQ is a 130/15 or 8.6 standard deviation event. The human population is much too small for us to think that anyone has an IQ this large.

The rebuttal to sci-fi scenarios is to demonstrate that it's not physically possible, not that it's merely really difficult to pull off. And even the difficult stuff is probably not THAT difficult, given how humans failed to coordinate in response to a pandemic scenario.

Thus far, most everything that the superintelligent AI is supposedly able to do is physically doable if you have a precise enough understanding of the way things work and can access the tools needed to do it.

The ONLY part of Yud's claimed end-of-times scenarios that has seemed implausible to me is the "everyone on the planet falls dead at the same instant" part. And that's probably a failure of my imagination, honestly.

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