Category Archives: Thoughts

Beyond Popper

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine recently about the nature of knowledge. As with just about any discussion of epistemology with me, much of the conversation was about critical rationalism. In this discussion, I came to realize something. One of the key foundations of critical rationalism is the idea that no [...]

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Why is it so annoying to be wrong?

The all-important black swan If someone is interested in the truth, it’d be a blessing to them to learn exactly what falsehoods they believe. An ideal truth-seeker would love to be wrong, because it would give them the chance to improve their ideas. This is the basis of scientific thinking, but it’s not a very [...]

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Mini-Project: Think Like a “Good Old AI” Researcher

Those who’ve known me for many years will know that I love to create fictional worlds. They represent the epitome of complicated systems, with all of the messiness and detail of the real world combined with the flexibility required to satisfy my creative desires. Because of the immensity of world-building, at a certain point it [...]

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‘Shopped

var activateHoverMode = false; function doHover(goingIn) {if (activateHoverMode) {if (goingIn){document.getElementById(“thor”).src=”http://raelifin.com/files/thor_original.jpg”}else{document.getElementById(“thor”).src=”http://raelifin.com/files/thor.jpg”}}}I did some photoshopping the other day. Can you tell how I modified this image?

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The Genius Of SIAI

This post is in some respects a response to “Terminated” on the GoiD blog, though I was already planning on writing something along these lines. I used to be more optimistic about the benevolence of Artificial Intelligence (AGI). I figured that the worst thing that could happen would be the creation of truly intelligent machines [...]

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