My favorite lines in this excellent post: “An intelligent person who uses her intelligence to become a cutting edge researcher executes well, but gets no credit for being intelligent. But a person who is faced with a hard choice and does the right thing has genuinely moved the cosmos.” This confronts us with the question: Can an AGI be truly intelligent, and can it become a meaningful partner to humanity, in our partnership with our Creator to repair the cosmos, if, unlike our Creator’s bold step, we shy away from giving AGI free will?
This makes me think of Bach's saying that "I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well."
Did Bach create alpha? My intuition is-- maybe you disagree!-- that he must have. If any person's life and works "moved.the cosmos," his did, and it is hard to categorize his contribution to human culture as just "keeping the lights on".
Yet how is he different from the cutting-edge researcher in your example who "merely" grinds out beta? What was the source of his amazing output if not being in the right place at the right time, a one-in-a-billion innate talent with an environment of opportunity and obligation that "naturally" channeled that talent into his vast corpus of music?
Do you think he simply must have made difficult and transcendent choices which he was too modest to admit-- or was not consciously aware of himself? If so, where might we look for insight into the nature of those choices?
I will bite the bullet on this and say that Bach only generated alpha insofar as he overcame his yetzer hara. By definition this struggle is invisible to us. Otherwise we can applaud him for his innate gifts and great devotion and execution. I certainly love Bach, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t Beta. Beta is nothing to scoff at.
Huh. That in turn reminds me of Scott Alexander's classic "Meditations on Moloch"-- if his concept of Moloch is not identical to yetzer hara, surely it is closely related? And perhaps there is an even closer relationship between your idea of alpha and Scott's concept of overcoming or resisting Moloch.
My favorite lines in this excellent post: “An intelligent person who uses her intelligence to become a cutting edge researcher executes well, but gets no credit for being intelligent. But a person who is faced with a hard choice and does the right thing has genuinely moved the cosmos.” This confronts us with the question: Can an AGI be truly intelligent, and can it become a meaningful partner to humanity, in our partnership with our Creator to repair the cosmos, if, unlike our Creator’s bold step, we shy away from giving AGI free will?
This makes me think of Bach's saying that "I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well."
Did Bach create alpha? My intuition is-- maybe you disagree!-- that he must have. If any person's life and works "moved.the cosmos," his did, and it is hard to categorize his contribution to human culture as just "keeping the lights on".
Yet how is he different from the cutting-edge researcher in your example who "merely" grinds out beta? What was the source of his amazing output if not being in the right place at the right time, a one-in-a-billion innate talent with an environment of opportunity and obligation that "naturally" channeled that talent into his vast corpus of music?
Do you think he simply must have made difficult and transcendent choices which he was too modest to admit-- or was not consciously aware of himself? If so, where might we look for insight into the nature of those choices?
I will bite the bullet on this and say that Bach only generated alpha insofar as he overcame his yetzer hara. By definition this struggle is invisible to us. Otherwise we can applaud him for his innate gifts and great devotion and execution. I certainly love Bach, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t Beta. Beta is nothing to scoff at.
Huh. That in turn reminds me of Scott Alexander's classic "Meditations on Moloch"-- if his concept of Moloch is not identical to yetzer hara, surely it is closely related? And perhaps there is an even closer relationship between your idea of alpha and Scott's concept of overcoming or resisting Moloch.