Highly intelligent and successful people who hold weird beliefs
kruel.co
kruel.co
[1]: http://www.pewforum.org/2012/12/18/global-religious-landscap...
"Georges Lemaître proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. He was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest."
>Also note that I am not claiming that the beliefs hold by these people are necessarily wrong (although some of them almost certainly are).
"The point of the list is partly to show that it is possible to be very smart, and successful, and yet hold beliefs that are widely regarded as unsupported, absurd, or simply flawed."
Religion is a construct of the powerful, and to follow one without tangibly benefiting from it is quite weird. I personally believe many "religious" people just go to church to participate and benefit from the community and cultural aspects.
> Mullis also claims to have chatted with a glowing raccoon that he met at midnight while on his way to the loo then losing the ensuing six hours as a result of an alien abduction. The improvements made by Mullis allowed polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to become a central technique in biochemistry and molecular biology...
And probably dropped the anti-religion slant. There's enough weirdness in here without being a dbag.
....and his first three examples of "weird beliefs" are an Orthodox Jew and two Christians.
"Weird" is very clearly "in the eye of the beholder" here.
Religious beliefs are obviously very common, and not suprising for humans. That doesn't mean they have any scientific underpinning, and just because they are commonly believed does not mean they should be immune from (sensible) criticism.
That said, I'm surprised to find Ray Kurzweil's and Elon Musk's ideas in the same group as bible code and water memory.
Also that mere shades of intent can make the difference between "weird belief" and the latter two classifications. Tipler's Omega Point is an excellent example of the type. It would be an interesting exploration of anthropic influence on future cosmology, our determination to turn the future light cone into intelligent matter, in light of prevalent knowledge at the time of initial publication re: future big crunch likelihood, except for the determined shoehorning into Christian theology on the part of the author. Oh well.
Elon Musk (CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and chief product architect of Tesla Motors) claims that with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon and compares the potential dangers of artificial intelligence to nuclear weapons. He believes that the risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most.
The only thing weird in the article is the writer's arrogance.
> Roger Penrose (mathematical physicist, mathematician and
> philosopher of science) argues that known laws of physics
> are inadequate to explain the phenomenon of consciousness.
Quite frankly, I find the list itself weirder than most of the people on it.
I think it's dangerous when laymen who admire these individuals for their excellent work in their respective fields also assume their beliefs in other fields and areas are equally credible. The same examples suggested here can occur in much more subtle ways - for instance - Elon Musk and his views on A.I. have been made famous, even though he has absolutely no formal background in A.I.
*EDIT: completely missed that the author used Elon as an example. Nonetheless I stand by my point.
Uh, yeah, that's really fucked up. </sarcasm> Until we actually make strong AI, we have no reason to believe that consciousness could arise in anything but a few nodes somewhat late in the billion-year long continuous physical process we call "life", of which we as individuals are just a small part.
I'm not saying AI isn't possible, but I think a healthy respect for the complexity of life is in order. Take a look at the structure of a bacteria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteria#Intracellular_structu..., and then tell me why it's so crazy that so many biologists believe in God, or that Penrose might believe that such complexity is out of our reach to explain or reproduce.
I think that's fair enough; don't get so hung up on his choice of "weird". (I find his using Javascript to append stuff to the copypaste buffer much more offensive.)
I find this very surprising. To me, powerful AI is more akin to the atomic age than Human Intelligence v2. It's an extremely powerful tool that can be used for good or evil, so naturally there are huge opportunities and dangers both. But the computers rising up in defiance of their creators? I just don't see it. Humans are driven in their ambitions by desire, pleasure, and pain, all of which are closely tied into the mystery of sentient consciousness.
You could program an agent that is demonstrably superior to humans in various measures of intelligence. But until we've somehow made a computer want something, there is no more danger of it rising up against us than there is of a nuclear bomb spontaneously deciding to detonate itself. And I've seen no indication that anyone has any idea what it would mean to make a computer experience want, to set its own goals instead of just pursuing whatever goals were established by its programming.
I don't discount this possibility completely. But I think that we're really much farther away from creating robots with human-like ambition than people fear. Researchers in the 1950s thought they were a few decades away from Strong AI. I personally believe that current worries around ambitious, insubordinate robots are likewise really premature.
I guess the issue is that if you see someone with some obviously logically inconsistent ideas, why trust any of their other ideas? The answer is that in fact you don't trust any of them, instead only rely on experimental results.