“Now I know why people believe in QAnon.”

I had a lovely conversation today with a professional colleague who also keeps bees. He has lots of local customers who buy his honey because they believe eating local honey will help them with their allergies. The evidence for that is not good, and he tells his customers that. But they don’t believe him. They persist in the belief that eating local honey helps.

He said, “now I know why people believe in QAnon,” and we chatted about conspiracy theories and such for a while.

He mentioned his surprise that otherwise educated people would believe something for which there is little or no evidence.

I’m not surprised at all. I’m a skeptic about the alleged benefits of (what passes for) education. I know lots of educated people who believe very silly things. Part of the reason for this is that education has become mostly indoctrination. They don’t teach you to think critically. They don’t expect you to consider opposing viewpoints. Rather, the reverse.

A big part of the problem with false beliefs is that we’ve lost trust in our institutions. E.g.,

Beekeeper: Studies show that local honey doesn’t help with allergies.

Honey buyer: Those studies were probably funded by Big Pharma. They don’t make any money off local honey, so they want us to buy their stuff.

Note an interesting contrast here. It would be to my friend’s benefit to encourage people to believe that local honey helps with allergies. But he doesn’t. Because he’s an honest man.

We can easily believe that a particular man is honest. We have a very hard time believing that a corporation is honest. That’s worth thinking about.

He also mentioned the negative effect of right-wing media, which is always tearing down trust in our institutions. I agree, although I don’t believe it’s confined to right-wing media, and data I’ve seen indicates that belief in conspiracies is a bi-partisan problem.

The other thing to consider is the involvement of Russia and China. The silly Democrat lie was that Russia tried to promote Trump. The truth is that Russian wants to sow distrust in our institutions. “Trump v Clinton” is not nearly as important to them as getting Americans to distrust their system.

Same with China.

They want to undermine us from within.

If AI can be sentient, then you’re probably AI

Some guy at Google got in trouble for claiming that their AI has become sentient. (Is it possible for AI to achieve sentience?)

For starters, in this context “sentience” means “having first-person experience and emotions.” E.g., the program’s fear of being turned off. None of us would care if the program was mimicking emotions. We’d have no moral problem with switching it on and off. But if it’s genuinely experiencing emotions, that’s a different thing.

I don’t know whether it’s possible to answer the question whether AI can be sentient in that sense, but we’ll probably have to settle for a rule like this: “if it’s indistinguishable from sentience, it’s sentient.” And then we’ll have to decide what legal rights sentient programs have, etc.

However that goes, I am pretty sure of this. If AI can be sentient, we have to face the possibility that we’re AI.

The reason is simple. If we can make sentient programs, then it’s a pretty sure thing we’ll make lots of them. For example, someone will want to run multiple simulations of the Battle of Gettysburg, to see how things would have turned out if Jackson had been there, etc., and it will be a better simulation if all the characters have sentience.

Examples can easily be multiplied, and it’s child’s play to see that the ratio of AI people to “real” people will increase dramatically. Especially if we posit that AI people can also create these simulations.

If these simulated characters believe they’re real humans, on what grounds can we assert that we’re “real” and not AI, especially given the probable ratios?

There are ways out of this, of course. We could realize the danger of programmatic sentience and put severe limitations on it. Or we could believe that once the programs become sentient, that will be the end, so there will never come a time when college kids are creating AI people to do their historical analyses, play their games, etc.

“Firemen,” “man of the week,” and pronouns, plus some thoughts on Florida

Pigweed and Crowhill go old school and insist that words ending in “man” are perfectly acceptable, as is “he” as the interdeterminate pronoun. “Man of the week,” pronouns, etc.

They also reflect on some of the peculiarities of the Sunshine State: Florida, casual dress, bikinis and Florida man