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Pretend you have a really great programming day. You only have to attend a few meetings, have only a few off-topic conversations, don'...
So what is the substrate of Western thought?
...
Westerners, he says, prefer to understand things as mechanisms, while the Chinese prefer to understand things as organisms — and these are two very different kinds of processes.
This recognition should cause us to rethink what ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ really are. If by ‘nature’ we mean something divorced from or untouched by humans, there’s almost nowhere on Earth where such conditions exist, or have existed for thousands of years. The same can be said of Earth’s climate. If early agricultural land use began warming our climate thousands of years ago, as the early anthropogenic hypothesis suggests, it implies that no ‘natural’ climate has existed for millennia.
The most common question students have about mathematics is “when will I ever use this?” Many math teachers would probably struggle to give…
Cognitive biases potentially affecting judgment of global risks
Forthcoming in Global Catastrophic Risks, eds. Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic
Draft of August 31, 2006.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
(yudkowsky@singinst.org)
Singularity Institute for Artificial I