Jinnetic Engineering by Richard Stallman | Hacker News Reader

Jinnetic Engineering by Richard Stallman

stallman.org

54 pointsrevorad17 comments

Fascinating story.

The story's narrator is supposed to be a woman, but the story has an unmistakably male voice. I can't pinpoint it exactly, but everyone I know who talks like that is male. Part of it may be that there is no discussion of her emotions at all, she sounds like a perfectly rational robot.

Also, considering the impact of voluntary ovulation and superior intelligence on reproductive fitness, I suspect evolution will quickly develop an immunity to the virus, reverting the harmful changes in merely a few generations.

Weak MALE in fact!

http://www.hackerfactor.com/GenderGuesser.html

"I suspect evolution will quickly develop an immunity to the virus, reverting the harmful changes in merely a few generations."

Not with millions-soon-billions of super-intelligent people running around with the capacity to choose to fix that. Evolution will be dominated by human intelligence and intention at that point. It'll still exist, but, well, essentially the story is a Singularity story and we can't predict what will happen past the end of it.

Up until very recently evolution has been selecting in favor of intelligence. Otherwise we wouldn't have it. As for the claim that the dumb are out-reproducing the smart now; well, I'd say that's a consequence of smart people desiring to invest more in their kids, but it doesn't have to be that way in a different societal environment. In particular, I can't see free reproduction and globalizing civilization co-existing for many generations longer.

The question that this story raises is "Can we solve these hard problems of aging, thinking, and feeling if we had intelligence far greater than we do today?"

Are we meant to read the narrator's idea that they can even solve the problems of aging and diseases and voluntary ovulation through science and intelligence as naive or inevitable?

Just because we can imagine a virus or a team of super smart people solving these problems, doesn't mean in reality it actually is possible to do so given limitations of physics and human nature.

I guess it doesn't really matter if RMS meant this story to be a satire of a technocrat's fantasy or a example of how increased intelligence would solve some of our biggest problems but I think how people read the story will depend a lot on their ideas about what is ultimately achievable and what is not through intelligence.

This discussion between Peter Thiel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Aubrey de Grey - http://www.vimeo.com/7396024 - has some good thoughts from the top people who are in fact working on those problems.

Couple of important highlights for me were:

Eliezer saying that he has to often remind himself to do not what he has most fun doing, not even what he has talent for but what needs to be done.

The other is Aubrey talking about how appalling it is that the smartest people in science work on the same things instead of working on important but ignored problems.

I highly recommend watching it, it's well worth the 29 minutes.

well to be fair, the genie solved the problems, the smart people are just copying.

This is a weak story. It even says the genie is supposed to screw with the wishes, but then apparently doesn't. The only point of the story is to state some sci-fi fantasies about improving human life, and these aren't very illuminating.

Concerning the ethical statements (selfishness is foolish and will lead to disaster) of the jinn, it might be interesting to see a jinn story about an altruist that gets 3 wishes and how those lead to disaster. Of course, real-life history is full of that.

I'm not sure the three wishes chosen are the best possible.

Obviously, ``Five more wishes, please.'' Would be nice, but the Jinn obviously would have refused.

Something that would have broken entropy would have been nice, though. A battery that can give infinite current...

A spaceship would also have been a good choice.

"Name anything, uchuusen that blings..."

Square Spots Illness? Indeed.

"I can't give you the interview you've been begging for, but at least I can now explain how I was able to change fields and accomplish so much in such a short time."

It's not very often I stop reading HN-submitted article after the first sentence. ;) Do we really need more Stallman here?

You may want to reconsider.

It is a short story narrated by a character named Ethel. Nothing to do with Richard except that he authored it.

I think your comment about having read only one line of a story/article is one of the smarter comments about having read only one line of a story/article that I have ever read. Which is why I think it is safe to say that people who have only read the first line should refrain from making comments. You made a perfectly reasonable assumption given the first line, but even perfectly reasonable assumptions can be completely overturned a paragraph or two later. I think if someone is going to take the time to post, they should also take the time to read whatever they're going to post on.

This is a strange type of comment, which often appears on HN. "I didn't bother to read the article, but here's my meta objection to it anyway". If you didn't read it, you don't know what's in there. If you don't like something, skip or flag it. Please stop posting smug comments about where you stopped reading articles.

Oh yeah? So I'm modding you down without reading your comment. Neener-neener.

One: Since you're responding to his comment, it seems likely that you did, in fact, read it. True, it could have been read to you, or you could perhaps have used a Braille reader, or maybe you were bitten by a radioactive spider and developed the ability to psychically know what people's HN comments say without reading them, but statistically speaking it's probably safe to assume none of those are true.

Two: Assuming you did downmod his comment without reading it, you're exhibiting arbitrary behavior in a community of mostly reasonable and logical people. Perhaps this isn't the best place for you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com