I opened the link to your blog and had an initial negative aesthetic/readability reaction, which is a typical problem I’ve encountered when jumping away from Less Wrong. LW is highly optimized for clean readability. How does your cathedral background image help quickly communicate the ideas of your post? Also, the italicized text in particular is hard to read. The visual jump from LW to your blog’s layout is jarring, and this immediately sets up an internal negative ‘ugh’ reaction. I’m attentive to these aesthetic details because I’ve encountered the same problem in my own blog.
Your post is long and intertwines a number of distantly related complex ideas. I scanned it and quickly came to a decision to commit perhaps a couple of minutes to skim/speed read and then reply here.
I am not immediately put off by equating super-intelligences to gods, mixing in some theological references/analogies, or even all the unsubtle connotations of the blog title “Computational Theology”. However, I’m pretty certain I am atypical for LW in these regards. I have a general interest in evolution of religions, early Christianity in particular, and the similarity between transhumanist visions of the future and some strains of Christian Eschatology, for strategic reasons if nothing else.
I take Simulism somewhat seriously, and suspect that the Simulist cosmology could be the next major copernican worldview shift. On the other hand, I don’t have much interest or place much credence in psi-phenom. So given all that I jumped down and mainly tried to find your justification for the planetarium hypothesis.
From my understanding of future technological capability, a physical planetarium will always be an extraordinarily expensive endeavor. What’s the point?
If the point is intervention, to alter the developmental trajectory of a planet, there are vastly cheaper options: small levers with huge future effects. And even if the desired intervention is of a specific variety along the lines of “let humanity develop as if it was the first civilization”, that could be achieved by constructing an alternate universe tweaked for that future at a tiny fraction of the cost of building a planetarium.
How does your cathedral background image help quickly communicate the ideas of your post?
On the main page it seems unmotivated—vague connections to God and architecture—but if you click “About” you see more of the photo. The photo was selected because it implies God but its emphasis is architecture, and the highly organized structure of the architecture is supposed to evoke formalism and technology, thus linking God to computationalism. I couldn’t think of anything better, and honestly I quite like the photo. Any suggestions?
And yes, if you’re willing to accept the simulation solution, then the planetarium hypothesis just isn’t as good an explanation. The planetarium hypothesis is mostly for people who are skeptical of simulationism, or people who want to have a backup hypothesis in case simulationism doesn’t work, like myself. I generally prefer something like simulationism, but the planetarium hypothesis is my second favored hypothesis.
ETA: I’ve changed the typeface to Times New Roman, which should make the italics easily readable. Thanks for the feedback, I wasn’t sure if the the olde font was appropriate or not.
To me the full background picture is visually distracting. I find it aesthetically jarring/unpleasing, and probably subconsciously associate that visual style with hastily constructed blogs, or at least blogs outside of my typical reading preference. I prefer the background image to be constrained to just the top of the blog, in the typical fashion of blogs like LW. If you really like the photo, have a link to it or embed it in the article somewhere.
The planetarium hypothesis is mostly for people who are skeptical of simulationism, or people who want to have a backup hypothesis in case simulationism doesn’t work, like myself.
You wording suggests you view these hypotheses as tools required to achieve some predetermined objective, rather than just as beliefs subject to observational revision.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll go for a solid background. (ETA: Changed to timeless black to be a little easier on the eyes than some websites. Unfortunately I can’t change the page’s color to a light grey, will have to use some CSS. I’ll consider further optimization later.)
You wording suggests you view these hypotheses as tools required to achieve some predetermined objective, rather than just as beliefs subject to observational revision.
Both and neither. I have many different epistemic practices, and I also try to switch up my epistemological approaches often. Coherentism, pragmatism, correspondence, whatever—ultimately I think the foundations of epistemology are to be found in decision theory, and any other epistemological approaches are just phenomenal shards of the fundamental nature of rationality. Hypotheses can be tools, hypotheses can be correspondences—whatever leads to intellectual fruit. “May we not forget interpretations consistent with the evidence, even at the cost of overweighting them.” Similarly, may we not forget epistemologies consistent with potentially optimal decisions, even at the cost of overweighting them. We must be meta, we must be large.
I opened the link to your blog and had an initial negative aesthetic/readability reaction, which is a typical problem I’ve encountered when jumping away from Less Wrong. LW is highly optimized for clean readability. How does your cathedral background image help quickly communicate the ideas of your post? Also, the italicized text in particular is hard to read. The visual jump from LW to your blog’s layout is jarring, and this immediately sets up an internal negative ‘ugh’ reaction. I’m attentive to these aesthetic details because I’ve encountered the same problem in my own blog.
Your post is long and intertwines a number of distantly related complex ideas. I scanned it and quickly came to a decision to commit perhaps a couple of minutes to skim/speed read and then reply here.
I am not immediately put off by equating super-intelligences to gods, mixing in some theological references/analogies, or even all the unsubtle connotations of the blog title “Computational Theology”. However, I’m pretty certain I am atypical for LW in these regards. I have a general interest in evolution of religions, early Christianity in particular, and the similarity between transhumanist visions of the future and some strains of Christian Eschatology, for strategic reasons if nothing else.
I take Simulism somewhat seriously, and suspect that the Simulist cosmology could be the next major copernican worldview shift. On the other hand, I don’t have much interest or place much credence in psi-phenom. So given all that I jumped down and mainly tried to find your justification for the planetarium hypothesis.
From my understanding of future technological capability, a physical planetarium will always be an extraordinarily expensive endeavor. What’s the point?
If the point is intervention, to alter the developmental trajectory of a planet, there are vastly cheaper options: small levers with huge future effects. And even if the desired intervention is of a specific variety along the lines of “let humanity develop as if it was the first civilization”, that could be achieved by constructing an alternate universe tweaked for that future at a tiny fraction of the cost of building a planetarium.
On the main page it seems unmotivated—vague connections to God and architecture—but if you click “About” you see more of the photo. The photo was selected because it implies God but its emphasis is architecture, and the highly organized structure of the architecture is supposed to evoke formalism and technology, thus linking God to computationalism. I couldn’t think of anything better, and honestly I quite like the photo. Any suggestions?
And yes, if you’re willing to accept the simulation solution, then the planetarium hypothesis just isn’t as good an explanation. The planetarium hypothesis is mostly for people who are skeptical of simulationism, or people who want to have a backup hypothesis in case simulationism doesn’t work, like myself. I generally prefer something like simulationism, but the planetarium hypothesis is my second favored hypothesis.
ETA: I’ve changed the typeface to Times New Roman, which should make the italics easily readable. Thanks for the feedback, I wasn’t sure if the the olde font was appropriate or not.
To me the full background picture is visually distracting. I find it aesthetically jarring/unpleasing, and probably subconsciously associate that visual style with hastily constructed blogs, or at least blogs outside of my typical reading preference. I prefer the background image to be constrained to just the top of the blog, in the typical fashion of blogs like LW. If you really like the photo, have a link to it or embed it in the article somewhere.
You wording suggests you view these hypotheses as tools required to achieve some predetermined objective, rather than just as beliefs subject to observational revision.
Thanks for the feedback. I’ll go for a solid background. (ETA: Changed to timeless black to be a little easier on the eyes than some websites. Unfortunately I can’t change the page’s color to a light grey, will have to use some CSS. I’ll consider further optimization later.)
Both and neither. I have many different epistemic practices, and I also try to switch up my epistemological approaches often. Coherentism, pragmatism, correspondence, whatever—ultimately I think the foundations of epistemology are to be found in decision theory, and any other epistemological approaches are just phenomenal shards of the fundamental nature of rationality. Hypotheses can be tools, hypotheses can be correspondences—whatever leads to intellectual fruit. “May we not forget interpretations consistent with the evidence, even at the cost of overweighting them.” Similarly, may we not forget epistemologies consistent with potentially optimal decisions, even at the cost of overweighting them. We must be meta, we must be large.