Edward Miller's Page

In 1971, the political philosopher Ivan Illich wrote a rather provocative book, called Deschooling Society. It was about modern educational systems and the way that they perpetuate hierarchical thinking by solidifying it in children from a young age. This hierarchical thinking filters out to the rest of society creating negative feedback loops which result in all sorts of problems.

Insightfully, he wrote that education should be self-directed using "learning webs." He e… Continue

Hayek's Road to Serfdom, while well-intentioned, is a completely misguided piece of literature because Hayek never thought in terms of the political compass, but rather in terms of some contrived spectrum of freedom with classical liberalism on one end and communism and fascism on the other end.

Instead of some arbitrary spectrum of freedom, the political compass has two relevant axes, one representing political preference and the other representing economic preference. The economic…

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(Posted a year ago on BetterHumans)

Artificial Intelligence does not have to act like human intelligence, and would almost assuredly be better off not acting like human intelligence.

At a WTA meetup, I had the pleasure of having lunch with Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI programmer from the Singularity Institute. He explained this concept quite nicely, and said he would be wary of creating sentient AI because of the ethical dilemmas it may pose, and also because sentient AI is n…

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The famous physicist Dr. Stephen Hawking recently asked a question on Yahoo Answers. The question was, "In a world that is in chaos politically, socially and environmentally, how can the human race sustain another 100 years?" http://answers.yahoo.com/question/?qid=20060704195516AAnrdOD

I am also interested, as we all should be, in what is being done and what needs to be done in regard to such…

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Excessive pride is one the major causes of problems in the world. It manifests itself as simple arrogance, vanity, or hubris and on a macro scale as nationalism, racism, sexism, homophobia, and all manner of intolerance.

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." - Albert Einstein

Nationalism is a deeply ingrained value of virtually every society. Nations, by their structure, have a direct interest in promoting nationalism. In extreme circumstances… Continue