False Beliefs Held by Intellectual Giants

July 15, 2023

Even many of the smartest people that have ever lived convinced themselves of false things (just like the rest of us). Here are some fun and wild examples: (1) Linus Pauling won TWO Nobel prizes - one in peace and one in chemistry. Unfortunately, he eventually became obsessed with and widely promoted the false (and sometimes still repeated) idea that high-dose vitamin C cures many diseases, including HIV and snakebites. (2) Isaac Newton, who co-invented calculus and discovered t...

13 metaphors to give the flavor of why sufficiently advanced A.I. could be extremely dangerous

April 2, 2023

1. Suppose a new species evolves on earth with the same intellectual, planning, and coordination abilities relative to us that we have relative to chimps. Chimps are faster and stronger than most humans - why don't they run the show? 2. Suppose aliens show up on earth that are far smarter than the smartest among us at all cognitive tasks. They have specific goals that aren't fully aligned with ours, are completely unconstrained by human morality, and don't value our survival. What happens ne...

Important (present and future) real-world applications of academic philosophy

August 10, 2021

Many people think that academic philosophy is irrelevant to the real world. But it has increasingly important applications. Here's my list of some of the really interesting ones. Here's hoping philosophers will make further progress on some of these! 1. The Trolley Problem: self-driving cars will be put in situations where there is a choice between sacrificing the passenger to save two pedestrians. Or they might have to choose between killing a 5-year-old pedestrian vs. killing a 70-year-...

11 Types of Thinkers and Intellectuals (a little framework)

August 23, 2020

1. Ideators: generate novel ideas Ex: Einstein Strengths: creativity, insight 2: Investigators: vigorously investigate a topic in order to understand it Ex: Curie Strengths: truth-seeking, curiosity, systematicness, persistence 3. Provers: demonstrate that the ideas of others are sound, explore their limits, strengthen or work out the implications of existing theories Ex: Singer Strengths: consistency, logic, rigor, bullet-biting 4. Appliers: explo...

Eschew Obscure Words

August 18, 2011

Intelligent people often like to use intelligent sounding words. Words like "nonplused", "loquacious" and "limerance" spice up writing and conversation, add beauty to language, and can seem to give the speaker an aura of sophistication. Even those who don't consciously cultivate having a large vocabulary may start to use such words automatically, having read them sufficiently many times in books or articles. Unfortunately, obscure words have a tendency to interfere with communication. Sometim...

Truth Discernment Can be a Super Power

August 3, 2011

When we think of super powers, we usually consider things like invisibility, super strength and the ability to fly. Technology is bringing us closer to the realization of these dreams (for examples see invisibility, strength, flying). But there is a super power that has existed for much longer, which we might call "truth discernment". This is the ability to figure out what is likely to be true in hard, important, real world problems. There are difficult questions like the blue eyes logic puzz...