MarsColony_in10years

Karma: 314

MarsColony_in10years 26 Aug 2016 19:29 UTC
0 points
in reply to: snewmark’s comment on: The Proper Use of Doubt

nothing has 100% certainty, nothing can have a 0% uncertainty

That’s my understanding as well. I was trying to say that, if you were to formalize all this mathematically, and took the limit as number of Bayesian updates n went to infinity, uncertainty would go to zero.

Since we don’t have infinite time to do an infinite number of updates, in practice there is always some level of uncertainty > 0%.

MarsColony_in10years 26 Aug 2016 18:30 UTC
32 points
on: Do you want to be like Kuro5hin? Because this is how you get to be like Kuro5hin.
Comment 1: If anyone wants to comment or reply here, but can’t afford the karma hit, feel free to PM me and I’ll comment for you without listing your name. I have 169 karma to burn (97% positive!), from comments going back to Feb 2015. However, I’ve wanted to update to a different username, so I don’t mind destroying this one.

Comment 2: It might be wise not to discuss tactics where eugine can read it. (Also, causing lots of discussion might be his goal, but so far we haven’t talked about it much and it’s just been a background annoyance.)

Is there interest in a skype call or some other private forum to discuss possible solutions?

[pollid:1160]

MarsColony_in10years 7 Mar 2016 0:19 UTC
3 points
in reply to: James_Miller’s comment on: What is the future of nootropic drugs? Why can’t there be ones more effective than ones that have existed for 15+ years?
I believe CronoDAS is referring to Algernon’s Law. Gwern describes the issues pretty well here, including several classes on “loopholes” we might employ to escape the general rule.

The classifications of different types of loopholes is still pretty high level, and I’d love to see some more concrete and actionable proposals. So, don’t take this as saying “this is old hat”, but only as a jumping off point for further discussion.

MarsColony_in10years 6 Mar 2016 2:04 UTC
2 points
on: Preference over preference
This may not be a generalized solution, but it looks like you have rigorously defined a class of extremely common problems. I suspect deriving a solution from game theory would be the formalized version of John Stuart Mill trying to derive various principles of Liberty from Utilitarianism.

Meta: 4.5 hours to write, 30mins to take feedback and edit.

I always find this sort of info interesting. Same for epistemic status. It’s nice to know whether someone is spit-balling a weird idea they aren’t at all sure of, versus trying to defend a rigorous thesis. That context is often missing in online discussions, and I’d love for it to become the norm here. I suppose knowing how much time you spent writing something only gives me a lower bound on how much thought has gone into the idea total, and some ideas really can be fleshed out completely in a couple hours while others may take generations.

MarsColony_in10years 2 Mar 2016 3:37 UTC
7 points
on: Attention! Financial scam targeting Less Wrong users
I was surprised to see mention of MIRI and Existential Risk. That means that they did a little research. Without that, I’d be >99% sure it was a scam.

I wonder if this hints at their methodology. Assuming it is a scam, I’d guess they find small but successful charities, then find small tight-knit communities organized around them and target those communities. Broad, catch-all nets may catch a few gullible people, but if enough people have caught on then perhaps a more targeted approach is actually more lucrative?

Really, it’s a shame to see this happen even if no one here fell for it, because now we’re all a little less likely to be receptive to weird requests/offers. I suspect it’s useful for EAs to be able to make random requests of specific people. For example, I can imagine needing a couple hours or days of consulting work from a domain expert. In that situation, I’d be tempted to PM someone knowledgeable in that area, and offer to pay them for some consulting work on the side.

I can actually think of 2 instances where this community has done things like this out in the open (not PM), so it wouldn’t surprise me if there are occasional private transactions. (I’d link to examples, but I’d rather not help a potential scammer improve on their methods.) Perhaps a solution would be to route anything that looks suspicious through Bitcoin, so that the transaction can’t be cancelled? I wouldn’t want to add trivial inconveniences to non-suspicious things, though.

MarsColony_in10years 23 Feb 2016 4:06 UTC
3 points
in reply to: MalcolmOcean’s comment on: Use unique, non-obvious terms for nuanced concepts
Although compressing a complex concept down to a short term obviously isn’t lossless compression, I hadn’t considered how confusing the illusion of transparency might be. I would have strongly preferred that “Thinking Fast and Slow” continue to use the words “fast” and “slow”. As such, these were quite novel points:
- they don’t immediately and easily seem like you already understand them if you haven’t been exposed to that particular source
- they don’t overshadow people who do know them into assuming that the names contain the most important features
The notion of using various examples to “triangulate” a precise meaning was also a new concept to me too. It calls to mind the image of a Venn diagram with 3 circles, each representing an example. I don’t think I have mental models for several aspects of learning. Gwern’s write up on spaced repetition gave me an understanding about how memorization works, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I had a similar gap in my model (or lack thereof) for how understanding works.

(I’m not sure the triangulation metaphor lends much additional predictive power. However, an explicit model is a step up from a vague notion that it’s useful to have more examples with more variety.)

MarsColony_in10years 21 Feb 2016 6:33 UTC
12 points
on: Use unique, non-obvious terms for nuanced concepts
I’ve always hated jargon, and this piece did a good job of convincing me of its necessity. I plan to add a lot of jargon to an Anki deck, to avoid hand-waving at big concepts quite so much.

However, there are still some pretty big drawbacks in certain circumstances. A recent Slate Star Codex comment expressed it better than I ever have:

One cautionary note about “Use strong concept handles”: This leans very close to coining new terms, and that can cause problems.

Dr. K. Eric Drexler coined quite a few of them while arguing for the feasibility of atomically precise fabrication (aka nanotechnology): “exoergic”, “eutactic”, “machine phase”, and I think that contributed to his difficulties.

If a newly coined term spreads widely, great! Yes it will an aid to clarity of discussion. If it spreads throughout one group, but not widely, then it becomes an in-group marker. To the extent that it marks group boundaries, it then becomes yet another bone of contention. If it is only noticed and used within a very small group, then it becomes something like project-specific jargon – cryptic to anyone outside a very narrow group (even to the equivalent of adjacent departments), and can wind up impeding communications.

MarsColony_in10years 18 Feb 2016 21:09 UTC
9 points
on: The ethics of eating meat
Meta note before actual content: I’ve been noticing of late how many comments on LW, including my own, are nitpicks or small criticisms. Contrarianism is probably the root of why our kind can’t cooperate, and maybe even the reason so many people lurk and don’t post. So, let me preface this by thanking you for the post, and saying that I’m sharing this just as an FYI and not as a critique. This certainly isn’t a knock-down argument against anything you’ve said. Just something I thought was interesting, and might be helpful to keep in mind. :)

Clearly it was a moral error to assume that blacks had less moral weight than whites. The animal rights movement is basically just trying to make sure we don’t repeat this mistake with non-human animals. (Hence the use of terms like “speciesism”.) You use a couple reductio ad absurdum arguments with bacteria and video game characters, but it’s not entirely clear that we aren’t just socially biased there too. If the absurd turns out to be true, then the reductio ad absurdum fails. These arguments are valid ways of concluding “if A than B”, but keep in mind that A isn’t 100% certain.

There are actually some surprisingly intelligent arguments that insects, bacteria, some types of video game characters, and even fundamental particles might have non-zero moral weight. The question is what probability one gives to those propositions turning out to be true. IF one has reviewed the relevant arguments, and assigns them infinitesimally small credence, THEN one can safely apply the reductio ad absurdum. IF certain simple algorithms have no moral weight and the algorithms behind human brains have high moral weight, THEN algorithms almost as simple are unlikely to have whatever property gives humans value, while complex algorithms (like those running in dolphin brains) might still have intrinsic value.

MarsColony_in10years 6 Feb 2016 20:35 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Request for help with economic analysis related to AI forecasting
As I understand it, Eliezer Yudkowski doesn’t do much coding, but mostly purely theoretical stuff. I think most of Superintelligence could have been written on a typewriter based on printed research. I also suspect that there are plenty of academic papers which could be written by hand.

However, as you point out, there are also clearly some cases where it would take much, much longer to do the same work by hand. I’d disagree that it would take infinite time, and that it can’t be done by hand, but that’s just me being pedantic and doesn’t get to the substance of the thing.

The questions that would be interesting to answer would be how much work falls into the first category and how much falls into the second. We might think of this as a continuum, ranging from 0 productivity gain from computers, to trillions of times more efficient. What sub-fields would and wouldn’t be possible without today’s computers? What types of AI research is enabled simply by faster computers, and which types are enabled by using existing AI?

Maybe I can type at 50 words a minute, but I sure as hell can’t code at 50 WPM. Including debugging time, I can write a line of code every couple minutes, if I’m lucky. Looking back on the past 2 things I wrote, one was ~50 lines of code and took me at least an hour or two if I recall, and the other was ~200 lines and took probably a day or two of solid work. I’m just starting to learn a new language, so I’m slower than in more familiar languages, but the point stands. This hints that, for me at least, the computer isn’t the limiting factor. It might take a little longer if I was using punch cards, and at worst maybe twice as long if I was drafting everything by hand, but the computer isn’t a huge productivity booster.

Maybe there’s an AI researcher out there who spends most of his or her day trying different machine learning algorithms to try and improve them. Even if not, It’d still take forever to crunch that type of algorithm by hand. It’d be a safe bet that anyone who spends a lot of time waiting for code to compile, or who rents time on a supercomputer, is doing work where the computer is the limiting factor. It seems valuable to know which areas might grow exponentially alongside Moore’s law, and which might grow based on AI improvements, as OP pointed out.

MarsColony_in10years 6 Feb 2016 6:30 UTC
3 points
on: Request for help with economic analysis related to AI forecasting
I like this idea. I’d guess that a real economist would phrase this problem as trying to measure productivity. This isn’t particularly useful though. Productivity is output (AI research) value over input (time), so this begs the question of how to measure the output half. (I mention it mainly just in case it’s a useful search term.)

I’m no economist, but I do have an idea for measuring the output. It’s very much a hacky KISS approach, but might suffice. I’d try and poll various researchers, and ask them to estimate how much longer it would take them to do their work by slide-rule. You could ask older generations of researchers the same thing about past work. You could also ask how much faster their work would have been if they could have done it on modern computers.

It would also probably be useful to know what fraction of researcher’s time is spent using a computer. Ideally you would know how much time was spent running AI-specific programs, versus things like typing notes/reports into Microsoft Word. (which could clearly be done on a typewriter or by hand.) Programs like RescueTime could monitor this going forward, but you’d have to rely on anecdotal data to get a historical trend line. However, anecdote is probably good enough to get an order-of-magnitude estimate.

You’d definitely want a control, though. People’s memories can blur together, especially over decades. Maybe find a related field for whom data actually does exist? (From renting time on old computers? There must be at least some records.) If there are old computer logs specific to AI researchers, it would be fantastic to be able to correlate something like citations/research paper or number of papers per researcher per year with computer purchases. (Did such-and-such universitys new punch-card machine actually increase productivity?) Publication rates in general are skyrocketing, and academic trends shift, so I suspect that publications is a hopelessly confounded metric on a timescale of decades, but might be able to show changes from one year to the next.

Another reason for good control group, if I remember correctly, is that productivity of industry as a whole didn’t actually improve much by computers; people just think it was. It might also be worth digging around in the Industrial-Organizational Psychology literature to see if you can find studies involving productivity that are specific to AI research, or even something more generic like Computer Science. (I did a quick search on Google Scholar, and determined that all my search terms were far too common to narrow things down the the oddly-specific target.)

MarsColony_in10years 30 Jan 2016 6:05 UTC
11 points
on: Clearing An Overgrown Garden
I could get behind most of the ideas discussed here, but I’m wary of the entire “Standards of Discourse and Policy on Mindkillers” section. It’s refreshing to have a section of the internet not concerned with politics. Besides, I don’t think the world is even Pareto optimized, so I don’t think political discussions are even useful, since acquiring better political views incur opportunity costs. Why fight the other side to gain an inch of ground when we could do something less controversial but highly efficient at improving things? I’m all for discussing weird, counterintuitive, and neglected topics, but politics is only interesting for the same reason soap operas and dramas are interesting. The most viral arguments aren’t necessarily the most worthwhile.

As for mandatory Crocker’s rules, the wiki article has this to say:

Crocker emphasized, repeatedly, in Wikipedia discourse and elsewhere, that one could only adopt Crocker’s rules to apply to oneself, and could not impose them on a debate or forum with participants who had not opted-in explicitly to these rules, nor use them to exclude any participant.

I suspect that if Crocker’s rules were mandatory for participation in something, there would be a large number of people who would be pushed into accepting them. I don’t think this would actually improve anything. Lots of people invoking Crocker’s rules is a symptom of a healthy discourse, not a cause of it. Personally, I know that when I invoke Crocker’s rules I have a much smaller knee-jerk reaction to criticism. LessWrong can already be a blunt place at times, probably more than is optimal.

I probably have 50 pages of random notes and thoughts that would be appropriate to post here, but haven’t. Some are things I started to write specifically for LW, but never finished polishing. I suspect both the community and I would benefit from the discussion, but honestly it takes an order of magnitude more time for me to get something to a state where I would be willing to post it here. That’s probably twice as much time as for me to be willing to post something on Facebook. I get diminishing returns from rereading the same thing over and over again, but it’s much more difficult to achieve activation energy here. I suspect that difference is mostly due to the subjective feel of the group.

MarsColony_in10years 8 Dec 2015 0:17 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Stupid Questions, December 2015
By “manufactured values” I meant artificial values coming from nurture rather than innate human nature. Obviously there are things we give terminal value, and things we give instrumental value. I meant to refer to a subset of our terminal values which we were not born with. That may be a null set, if it is impossible to manufacture artificial values from scratch or from acquired tastes. Even if this is the case, that wouldn’t imply that instrumental values could not be constructed from terminal values as we learn about the world. There are 4 possible categories, and I meant only to refer to the last one:
- Innate terminal values: “Being generous is innately good, and those who share are good people.” (Note: “generosity admired” is on the list of human universals, so it’s likely to be an innate value we are born with.)
- Innate instrumental values: N/A (I don’t think there is anything in this category, because innate human values in babies precede the capacity to reason and develop instrumental values. Maybe certain aesthetic values don’t express themselves until a baby first opens its eyes, and so there could be reasoned instrumental values which are more “innate” than aesthetic values.)
- learned instrumental values: “eating spicy food is good to do because it clears your sinuses”
- learned terminal values (that is, “manufactured” values): “Bacteria suffering matters, even though I have no emotional connection to them, because of these abstract notions of fairness.” Or, alternatively “Eating spicy food is a pure, virtuous activity in its own right rather than for some other reason. Those who partake are thus good people, and those who don’t are unclean and subhuman.” The former is merely extrapolated from existing values and dubbed a terminal value, while the latter arises from an artificially conditioned aesthetic.
To use a more LW-central example, those of us who favor epistemic rationality over instrumental rationality do so because true knowledge is a terminal value for us. If this value is a human universal, then that would be strong evidence that every neurotypical baby is born valuing truth, and therefore that truth-seeking is a terminal value. If only a few cultures value truth, then it would seem more plausible that truth-seeking was a manufactured terminal value or an instrumental value.

To test ideas like this, we can look at the terms on the list related to epistemic rationality: abstraction in speech & thought, classification, conjectural reasoning, interpolation, logical notions [there are several examples on the list], measuring, numerals (counting), overestimating objectivity of thought, semantics [several semantic categories are also on the list], true and false distinguished. So, either all cultures get a lot of value out of instrumental truth-seeking, or truth-seeking is an innate human value. Judging by the curiosity of children, I’m strongly inclined toward the latter. Perhaps LW users have refined and accentuated their innate human curiosity, but it certainly doesn’t seem like a manufactured value.

But it looks like you guys forced me to make my question specific enough that I could answer it empirically. I could just take each item on the list of the twelve virtues of rationality, or any other list I thought gave a good representation of LW values or intellectual values. Just cross-reference them against a couple lists of human universals and lists of traits of small children. If very small children display a value, it’s probably innate, but may be learned very early. If no infants have it but some/all adults do, it’s probably a learned value developed later in life. If it seems like it is probably a learned value, and seems subjectively to be a terminal value, then it is manufactured.

Also, to be clear, just because something is manufactured doesn’t make it a bad thing. To say so is to commit the naturalistic fallacy. However, altering one’s utility function is scary. If we are going to replace our natural impulses with more refined values, we should do so carefully. Things like the trolley problem arguably segregate people who have replaced their default values with more abstract utilitarian notions (value all lives equally, regardless of in-group or a sense of duty). Extrapolating new values from existing ones doesn’t seem as dangerous as deriving them from acquired tastes.

MarsColony_in10years 4 Dec 2015 16:43 UTC
3 points
on: Stupid Questions, December 2015
My possibly stupid question is: “Are some/all of LessWrong’s values manufactured?”

Robin Hanson brings up the plasticity of values. Humans exposed to spicy food and social conformity pressures rewire their brain to make the pain pleasurable. The jump from plastic qualia to plastic values is a big one, but it seems plausible. It seems likely that cultural prestige causes people to rewire things like research, studying, etc. as interesting/pleasurable. Perhaps intellectual values and highbrow culture are entirely manufactured values. This seems mildly troubling to me, but it would explain why rationality and logic are so hard to come by. Perhaps the geek to nerd metamorphosis involves a more substantial utility function modification than merely acquiring a taste for something new.

MarsColony_in10years 2 Dec 2015 17:40 UTC
1 point
on: Help with understanding some non-standard-LW philosophy viewpoints

“well, you’re also ultimately basing yourself on intuitions for things like logic, existence of mind-independent objects, Occamian priors, and all the other viewpoints that you view as intuitively plausible, so I can jolly well use whatever intuitions I feel like too.”

It’s true that a priori using intuition is about as good as using an intuitive tool like inductive reasoning. However, induction has a very very strong track record. The entire history of science is one of humans starting out with certain intuitive priors, and huge numbers of them being challenged by experimental evidence. Babies learn about the world using induction, so each one of us has a mountain of evidence supporting its usefulness. Once you perform a Baysian update on that evidence, intuition looks like a much less useful predictor of future events.

Sure, you can deny the validity of induction. You can also claim that “I think therefor I am” is invalid because it isn’t based on anything. (What is this “therefore” concept? What is “I”? What does it mean to “exist”?) You can even decide when to use induction versus intuition based on whim or based on which conclusion you want to “prove”. It’s just that doing so is incoherent.

Yes, I did just use an informal form of inductive reasoning, by using observations of evidence to demonstrate that induction seems valid upon reflection. Yes, that makes me feel dirty inside. But you have to start somewhere, and we don’t really have any better options. It should be noted that anyone who says “intuition is a better option” learned those 5 words through induction, and probably uses induction to override intuitions every day. It is mathematically provable that no mathematical system can assert its own soundness without becoming inconsistent. We can’t prove the validity of induction using induction. The best we can do is try to falsify the hypothesis “induction is valid”. If looking at the track record of induction seemed to indicate that it wasn’t valid, then we’d have an even worse mess on our hands, but fortunately that isn’t the case. If someone can come up with a better alternative to induction, they’d better be able to demonstrate that it is better.

Some would call that faith. I’d counter that faith is belief regardless of evidence, and this is forming beliefs based on all available evidence. If that’s faith, then so is every belief about anything.

MarsColony_in10years 26 Nov 2015 10:16 UTC
0 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015

the idea of people buying our product because we are EAs makes me uncomfortable.

In retrospect, I think that would make me uncomfortable too. In your position, I’d probably feel like I’d delivered an ultimatum to someone else, even if they were the one who actually made the suggestion. On the other hand, maybe a deep feeling of obligation to charity isn’t a bad thing?

Would you say that you are not interested in paying more for a healthier product, not convinced that MealSquares is better for you, something else?

Based on my (fairly limited) understanding of nutrition, I suspect that any marginal difference between your products is fairly small. I suspect humans get strongly diminishing returns (in the form of increased lifespan) once we have our basic nutritional requirements met in bio-available forms and without huge amounts of anything harmful. After that, I’d expect the noise to overpower the signal. For example, perhaps unmeasured factors like my mood or eating habits change as a function of my Soylent/MealSquares choice, and I wind up getting fast food more often, or get less work done or something. Let’s say it would take me a month of solid researching and reading nutrition textbooks to make a semi-educated decision of which of two good things is best. Would the added health benefit give me an additional month of life? What if I value my healthy life, here and now, far more than 1 more month spent senile in a nursing home? What if I also apply hyperbolic discounting?

I’ve probably done more directed health-related reading than most people. (Maybe 24 hours total, over the pasty year or so?) Enough to minimize the biggest causes of death, and have some vague idea of what “healthy” might look like. Enough to start fooling around with my own DIY soylent, even if I wouldn’t want to eat that every day without more research. If someone who sounds knowledgeable sits down and does an independent review, I’d probably read it and scan the comments for critiques of the review.

MarsColony_in10years 26 Nov 2015 8:45 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015
Someone gave you a downvote. If it was on my behalf or on the behalf of Soylent, then for the record I thought it was funny. :)

MarsColony_in10years 26 Nov 2015 8:31 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Soothsilver’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015
Hmmm, that’s worrying. I played with some numbers for a 5′6″ male, and got this:

99 lbs yields “Your BMI is way too low to be living”
100lbs yields 74 years
150lbs yields 76 years
200lbs yields 73 years
250lbs yields 69 years
300lbs yields 69 years
500lbs yields 69 years
999lbs yields 69 years

It looks to me like they are pulling data from a table, and the table maxes out under 250lbs?

MarsColony_in10years 25 Nov 2015 18:41 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Soothsilver’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015

avoiding obesity

Not to be pedantic, but I thought this might be of interest: As I understand it, amount of exercise is a better predictor of lifespan than weight. That is, I would expect someone overweight but who exercises regularly to outlive someone skinny who never exercises.

For example, this life expectancy calculator outputs 70 years for a 5“6” 25 year old male who weighs 300lbs, but exercises vigorously daily. Changing the weight to 150 lbs and putting in no exercise raised the life expectancy by only 1 year. (a bit less than I was expecting, actually. I was about to significantly update, but then it occurred to me that 300 lbs isn’t the definition of obesity. I knew this previously, but apparently hadn’t fully internalized that.) EDIT: This calculator may not work well for weights over ~250 lbs. See comment below.

So, my top two recommendations to friends would be quit smoking and exercise regularly. I’d recommend Less Wrongers either do high intensity workouts once a can read or watch Khan Academy or listen to The week to minimize the amount of time spent on non-productive activities, or pick a more frequent but lower intensity activity they Sequences audiobook while doing. I’m not an expert or anything. That’s just the impression I’ve gotten from my own research.

MarsColony_in10years 25 Nov 2015 16:24 UTC
3 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015
you’ll help us earn money for effective giving

I realize you are in the startup phase now, and so it probably makes sense for you to put any surplus funds into growth rather than donating now. However, 2 questions:
1. Once you finish with your growth phase, about what percent of your net proceeds do you expect to donate?
2. What sorts of EA charities are you interested in?
I’ve been using MealSquares regularly, without realizing that that you guys were LWers or EAs. As such, I’ve been using mostly s/Soylent because of the cost difference. (A 400 Calorie MealSquare is ~$3, a 400 Calorie jug of Soylent 2.0 is ~$2.83, 400 Calories worth of unmixed Soylent powder is ~$1.83, and the ingredients for 400 Calories worth of DIY People Chow are ~$0.70. All these are slightly cheaper with a subscription/large purchase.)

I ask, because if you happen to be interested in similar EA causes to me, and expect to eventually donate X% of proceeds, then I should be budgeting my expenses to factor that in. If (100%-X%) * MealSquares_Cost < soylent_Cost, then I would buy much less soylent and much (/many?) more MealSquares. I’d be paying a premium to Soylent in order to add a bit more culinary variety. (Also, I realize this X isn’t equal to the expected altruistic return on investment, but that would be even harder to estimate.)

MarsColony_in10years 15 Nov 2015 18:42 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Nomad’s comment on: Complex Novelty
Good point. It seems like we 1) value an incredibly diverse assortment of things, and 2) value our freedom to fixate on any particular one of those things. So, any future which lacks some option we now have will be lacking. Because at some point we have to choose one future over another, perhaps we will always have a tiny bit of nostalgia. (Assuming that the notion of removing that nostalgia from our minds is also abhorrent.)

I’ll also note that after a bit more contemplation, I’ve shifted my views from what I expressed in the second paragraph of my comment above. It seems plausible that certain classes of problems tickle a certain part of our brain. Visual stimuli excite our visual cortex, so maybe Rubik’s Cubes excite the parts of our brain involved in spatial reasoning. It seems plausible, then, that we could add entire new modules to our minds for solving entire new classes of problems. Perhaps neuroplasticity allows us to already do this to a degree, but it also seems likely that a digital mind would be much less restricted in this regard.