Hongkie

Eating, Fast and Slow.

What's your thought on N.N. Taleb's work on extreme events/ randomness? His idea that people see pattern when there is none, attribute skill to luck etc? Do you think your work support his arguments or do you think you are contradicting them by finding legitimate patterns in random errors?

I agree with you that a lot of these irrational behaviors are more or less predictable. The evidences are convincing. I guess I'm trying to get a sense of whether you think we can accurately predict human behaviors if we understand the full complexity of human motivations and incentives etc. I.e. do you think Taleb's idea of 'randomness' is only random because we didn't have sufficient data to feed into the models.

Do you think there is a realistic difference between being "meat robot," as in dictated by our gene-expressions, vs being "unnatural" as in surviving on pace makers, implants, wearable devices, lab grown food, won't know what to do without google/smart phone, and preferring mobile gaming/ porn over sex, so that reproduction rate fell off a cliff?

I share your sentiment that "natural" as a brand is very deceiving, and I'm not anti-GMO or aspertame (!) or virtual machines etc, but do you think it's valid to be concerned about living so artificially? So much so that we see animals as robots, as opposed to robots as imitation humans?

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Thanks for the comment, I love your book, I read quite a few science genre books but yours is so personal, it reads more like an open funny love letter to your son, it's lovely and really brave in some way.

I'm with you regarding the brutality of "nature," I've worked in remote sites before, and the whole team had gotten pretty sick.

Can I ask another question RE your comment? If, artificial technological advances are inevitable and natural part of human, can we sit back and just accept the sixth extinction, or superintelligent robots destroying all (most?) living things to build their empire? I am curious how you feel about the idea that human might just be a transient species to bring about Artificial Super Intelligence. Is that a "good thing?"