I have! It was a good conversation.

Good points. I guess one question which a theory of mind might help us answer: are we optimized or are we mediocre WRT intelligence. And the AI winter stuff is also interesting because until AI tools can make better AI tools without human intervention, then I would say we aren't anywhere near a singularity anyway.

I love this distinction between knowledge and intelligence. Very important!

I agree. And, I think we have a long way to go before we exhaust our ability to discover new knowledge. Yes, that could be a type of singularity, but I don't think it is what is normally considered for the concept.

Yup. But I think we are growing there too. We just haven't had to face the kinds of global challenges that we are now facing, and/or, we haven't truly solved the root causes that led to previous global challenges (e.g. world wars). I'm an optimist: I believe we'll get through it all.

p.s. I'm not a cognitive scientist so I may be unaware of recent research proving a theory of mind which validates the concept of unlimited intelligence. I'm happy to be informed if such a theory of mind does exist.

All of the folks who talk about the inevitable singularity fail to make their case based on one really obvious and important assumption which --may-- be flawed.

To understand the assumption, though, requires understanding a concept related to intelligence, namely, the "theory of mind". Right now, most computer scientists and cognitive scientists believe that the mind is an emergent or contingent property of physics, chemistry, biology and evolution. However, this is not proven any more than the existence of souls are proven. This theory of mind is at the basis of all AI work and all speculation about where AI can go.

However, this theory of mind is very limited and does not describe a direct path from physics through the other disciplines to the reality we experience as humans of having intentionality, choice, self-control, an internal voice, control of our internal voice, meaning, etc. which are all part of our experience of intelligence.

So, the flaw then, at least potentially, is that without a proper theory of mind that makes that connection... and even with a validated theory of mind, we may discover that there is a fundamental LIMIT to the level of intelligence possible. We may discover that humans already represent the maximum possible level of intelligence in our given universe.

So, is a singularity even possible? We have no way of knowing until either it happens or we develop a theory of mind that can properly prove that intelligence has no upper bound.

Why?

Seriously, we (parents and society) brainwash our kids all the time because we created them. What's so different about an AGI?

-- Mishkin.

You can find a little bit of original source material compiled here: https://www.bahai.org/library/...
And a bit of an overview here: https://www.bahai.org/beliefs/...

But overall, it's a bit hard to find details online. There are a few principles that Bahais follow regarding government, politics, etc.:
1. Non-involvement in partisan politics due to its divisive nature
2. All of society's institutions must be completely reformed, including government
3. A form of democracy is best, but current systems are corrupt
4. Institutions led by individuals (e.g. pope, kings, etc.) are to be removed from society
5. Capitalism, communism, socialism, etc. all have critical failings due to their non-acknowledgement of the spiritual nature of humanity (materialism)
6. Bahai elections (internally for the community) have no campaigning, no parties, and do not result in power or authority for individuals, but rather for collective bodies only

There's probably lots of other principles too that I'm just forgetting.

There are two books that are worth looking at if you want to dig deeper:
"The World Order of Baha'u'llah" by Shoghi Effendi
"Baha'i Administration" by Shoghi Effendi
both of which can be found online here: https://www.bahai.org/library/...

Sounds like the Bahaâ(TM)i system.

You forgot the link: http://www.noagendashow.com/

And, amen, fist bump, it's true!

Amen, fist bump! It's true!

Um bugs donâ(TM)t get points because they are waste, not value. Working on defects is supposed to reduce your velocity metric, not contribute to it.

The quality of the team is at the top of the list, but it is not the only thing on the list of what makes a work effort succeed.

I don't have a link handy, but the bi-annual Chaos Report by the Standish groups shows (last I checked) that Agile methods have 3x the success rate of waterfall methods. Interestingly, that doesn't get Agile over the 50% success margin! But waterfall had abysmal success rates.

Agile is not a silver bullet. But, it turns out that getting a high-quality team is a lot harder to do in advance (to do intentionally), than to use an Agile methodology. High-quality teams are rare, and they aren't just a simple collection of people with big brains or big resumes.

In fact, from a business perspective, Agile methods are a good bet: low cost to implement (compared to trying to get a good team), and a very high multiple for success. In other words, good ROI.

Logically, Cagle's argument mostly rests on anecdote. The one part that needs to be addressed is his claim for the exponential growth of cost of change in software (and other creative) work. As a professional programmer myself, I believed in this cost of change curve for the first 3 years of my professional life. Then I learned about test-driven development, refactoring, and a few other less-well-known technical practices and my experience changed.

Changing software is not actually hard. Instead, designers and developers make it hard. Then, because of two strong biases, the sunk cost fallacy (also known as throwing good money after bad), and confirmation bias (ignoring disconfirming evidence), we experience growing psychological effort in making change that makes the cost of change grow exponentially. In other words, the exponential growth in the cost of change isn't inherent in the creative work itself... that cost of change is a consequence of our psychology. As we build more and more stuff, we want to change it less and less. We resist change and that resistance shows up in a myriad of ways including:
- plain procrastination (but our hours are still counted!)
- narrowing of solution options to those which are compatible with what we have already built
- arguments about solutions instead of just trying solutions
- a desire to keep one's previous solutions even if they aren't good anymore and therefore building overly-complex accommodations to those solutions

A good Agile development environment actually creates the psychological environment to reduce or eliminate most of these biases. How? By giving a team practical technical, process and teamwork practices that reduce and flatten the cost of change curve.

FWIW, I'm an Agile consultant and trainer. I don't believe that Agile is for everything... but I do wish that more of these "Agile is dead" arguments would actually address the bias problems systematically. A good starting place is to read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman.

I've done both longitudinal studies and statistical studies in corporate environments starting in 2004 up until the present. Indeed, technology has improved and made some things about remote work arrangements better. And you are right, that there is an objective fact that costs are saved when using distributed/remote teams. But that cost savings is more than overwhelmed by the increased costs of delayed communication, decrease in communication fidelity, and lost opportunities for communication. So when you measure productivity properly (time value of business results / time value per unit of investment), you will find that the clear winner in most cases is collocation. I also want to be clear: there are other business drivers besides just short term profit so, for example, customer satisfaction might best be served with distributed team members that are close to customers. I'm definitely not saying that all teams are better collocated... just that this particular study appears to be deeply flawed.

The methodology seems to be surveys and focus groups. As if employees will report that distributed / remote work is less effective or productive.

The only way to do this properly is to measure the waste in their processes. The farcical thing is that the report actually identifies a whole bunch of different types of waste that are caused by alleviating some of the challenges of remote work: travelling to get face time, fiddling with technology, delays in communication due to needing to schedule meetings, etc.

I've known for 20 years that distributed work environments such for the business and are great for the employees. I've worked in both collocated and distributed environments and I've actually measured (objectively) the effects of both. Business people; don't be fooled! Distributed teams usually cost more than they are worth!