ACrackedPot

An In­tro­duc­tion to A Crack­pot Physics

A Crack­pot Physics: Issues

• ACrackedPot 20 Apr 2021 20:16 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: A Crack­pot Physics: Issues

  Updated with a link to the prior post, thanks!

A Crack­pot Physics: Time, Spe­cial Rel­a­tivity, and Why Bother?

• ACrackedPot 22 Apr 2021 14:39 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Slider’s comment on: An In­tro­duc­tion to A Crack­pot Physics

  I couldn’t read from the prose how the difference between lengths A and B get established.

  I think I’ve corrected this; I failed to note that A is closer to the planet’s surface than B, which was more obvious in the original version where I had a picture. Or do you mean I don’t justify it in terms of the new abstraction I’ve established?

  I too have wondered about how solid the “no boosting to infinity” restrictions are. If one takes a unit de-sitter Space that should cover all the directions. From one point of intuition at first glance it would feel that all the directions should be “locally adjacent” ie one should be able to travel on all points of a sphere by sliding the angle the radius is off-set from the origin.

  I’m not 100% certain what you mean by “no boosting to infinity” here, so it’s hard to interpret the rest of the statement.

  When drawn as a in a space-time diagram one gets an upwards opening parabola and a downwards opening parabola. But then it is puzzling on why they seem to be disconnected regions. I think I have something that speaks about the same are as your discussion 45 degree and 90 degree angles. The parabolas have asymptose at lightspeed ie 45 degree. However if one focuses on positive distance then the region from 45 to 135 doesn’t have anything, the elsewhere region where 90 degrees would lie is never visited. If one wants to include minus distances then there are going to be sidewyas parabola like strctures but the stark magnitude flip from positive to negative doesn’t seem like those would actually be in smooth contact. That is by having a constant radius and letting the angle be undetermined one gets the analog of the unit-sphere, the unit de-sitter space, and this does NOT include the “side-areas”. But it could be interesting if there was a smooth way to slide from the upregion to the downregion. Whether this is a cheating or allowed move is a bit beyond me.

  I think we’re talking about the space “inside” a singularity; if I’m mistaken, let me know.

  So the 45 and 90 degree explanation is built on an assumption of orthogonality between time and the three spacial dimensions that I’m not sure is entirely accurate. Consider a mass; now consider a point a meter away from that mass. I think the “natural” spacial dimensions here are: Distance (the line directly into/​away from the mass), and then four cardinal directions relative to Distance. Is Distance actually meaningfully distinct from Time? If we take simultaneity seriously, a change in Distance is equivalent, in a specific sense, to a change in Time.

  In your response to another post, you write “If you are thinking in euclidean terms it might seems that x,y,z,t can be relabeled into each other. However with relativity there is an “odd signature” going either (+---) or (-+++).”

  So time is inverted, relative to the other dimensions. More, given that Time and Distance are in a specific sense equivalent, I’d suggest Time is not actually orthogonal to Distance, but parallel, and “pointed” in the opposite direction. So we have something like this:

  <--------------------------------------->

  + Distance -

  <--------------------------------------->

  - Time +

  So, if we are pointed in a positive direction in distance, we’re pointed in a negative direction in time; that is, moving away from an object is moving towards its history (because time is emitted, not kept). Considering an arrow pointed into a singularity, we expect it to have the following vector: (-+) - moving closer to the object, and also towards its future. Rotate it 90 degrees, so its orientation in distance becomes its orientation in time, and we get (+-). (Which okay, looks more like a 360 degree rotation, but I will insist it’s a 90 degree rotation for difficult-to-explain reasons.) That is, after the ninety degree motion, we’re now pointed away from the singularity, and also into its history.

  So I think the apparently unconnected parabolas of the upregion and downregion are actually the same region.

• ACrackedPot 22 Apr 2021 15:24 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Slider’s comment on: A Crack­pot Physics: Time, Spe­cial Rel­a­tivity, and Why Bother?

  Your disagreement with your phycist friedns is that they are already taking the angle between the times of the observers into account while you are using viewpoint of “ah, there is a difference and with this new thing we can make it go away”.

  Not the impression I get, but there does tend to be a bit of a communication barrier, given how … odd my abstractions of these things to be.

  If I have a number like 1.01001100011100001111.… where there is supposed to be a digit pattern of ever expanding size this fails to be a rational number but is very strctured. However transcendental numbers include every digit combination (and none of them have an end). Most of these numbers don’t have a structure. It gets a bit muddled whether the “structuricity” or “self-similiarity” is essential or essential clue or totally optional. But being a number and being irrational doens’t give this structuricity.

  Sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that the behavior of numbers in this way is significant in some sense; rather, it’s just an example to try to explain the idea that it isn’t strictly necessary to these ideas for self-similarity to behave exactly like this. A logarithmic spiral works, and exhibits a particularly neat kind of self-similarity, but I think a hyperbolic spiral might also work under some other constraints, and it wouldn’t exhibit the same kind of neat self-similarity. Or the shape might not be a smooth spiral at all, but some jagged monstrosity.

  That is, the numbers are just trying to describe the “kind” of thing I’m trying to gesture at, lacking good language to define or describe it.

  If you are thinking in euclidean terms it might seems that x,y,z,t can be relabeled into each other. However with relativity there is an “odd signature” going either (+---) or (-+++). One can easily relabel like signs. But part of what gives the space its properties that there are “timelike” dimensions and “spacelike” dimensinos. SImple relabeling over all is not sufficient, in order to get full exhangeability something more tricsky would need to be done.If you are not taking these thinks into account you might have a lot of sign errors and some effects will go different direciton than expected.

  They aren’t actually exchangeable. But also they kind of are. This one is difficult to explain.

  Somebody traveling close to the speed of light, relative to us, has in a sense exchanged travel-in-time for travel-in-space. There is an “exchange” happening. But from the perspective of that person, we’re the one who have conducted an exchange.

  If they are traveling towards our Left, we could say that their “time” dimension is pointed partially Time-ward, and partially Left-ward. This doesn’t mean Left and Time have been exchanged, however; that’s just our perspective.

  Rather, I’d say it’s more correct to say that Time is like Left, in that it doesn’t point in any specific direction; you have to be inside space-time, with an orientation, in order for Time to point anywhere. And it doesn’t have to point in any particular direction; just as we can’t agree on what direction Left points, likewise we can’t agree on what direction Time points. In general I’d say that Time pointing in any particular direction would be privileging a reference frame.

  (But also, as mentioned in the other thread, I think Time and Distance are kind of the same thing, but also kind of not; Time is Distance turned inside out and upside down, sort of. That gets weird, because it kind of implies that you need singularities in order for Time to exist at all, which causes a bootstrapping issue with the universe. Granted that bootstrapping issue isn’t any worse than the universe already had, so oh well there.)

  Edit:

  Huh. Thought about this a little bit more, and was preparing to analogize this to the holographic principle. Then I considered timeless physics instead, since it seemed closer to what I’m doing here.

  And then I noticed those two ideas are kind of the same thing. So, the holographic principle, noticing that distance is unnecessary given that all the information we need is already encoded in time, says we can describe the universe as two spacial dimensions plus a time dimension. Timeless physics, noticing that time is unnecessary given that all the information we need is already encoded in distance, says we can describe the universe as three spacial dimensions. So there’s a generalization of both the holographic principle and timeless physics, I think.

• ACrackedPot 22 Apr 2021 17:37 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Slider’s comment on: An In­tro­duc­tion to A Crack­pot Physics

  If we place an analog clock with hands next to the lower bar that clock will appear to tick less than 1 time unit by the time the pulse has moved to the tips of the bar (assuming that local observer would think that it was covered in exactly 1 time unit). I am not sure you are using light as ruler in a correct way.

  That’s what I mean by the observers measuring different times for light crossing the different points; the major thing is that A is longer than B, because I’m trying (possibly failing) to suggest that the difference in distance arises from the fact that an observer in A is measuring some distance that an observer in B would call time, instead.

  The “boost to infinity” is just that energy requirements for high speeds seem to grow without bound. One way to measure change is one measure changing per change in another measure for example x per t. If a draw a curly line that has an U-turn in it I could get into trouble that at some point in the U turn the “next instantenous moment in coordinate time” could get a bit ambigious. Another concept could be the “next dot of the curve” and for curves that go relatively straight that next blob is likely to be in the “global forward” direction. So thinking in terms of max displacement per global forward tick vs maximum curl between adjacent blobs that the swiggle can have don’t neccesarily meet.

  I think I see, yes. I think it’s correct to say that energy requirements grow without bound—but I also think that that is a Newtonian framing of the question, in which “velocity” is a property of matter, which has an inexplicable maximum value.

  ...but I’m failing utterly to come up with an explanation that I think conveys that velocity isn’t just a scalar property of matter. I think it’s all going to sound like nonsense. I’ll think about this and return to it.

  Sorry, the signature is of the squares. The fuller equation is x^2+y^2+z^2-t^2=s^2. Increasing spatial separation gets you more of the measure, increasing time separation gets you less of the measure. If you take it in a certain way the underlaying number go complex but because people are allergic to the imaginary numbers people stay on the square level where it is just positive and negative reals.

  If it helps—it probably won’t—I think time is distance projected onto (desuspending into?) an imaginary plane. Specifically I think time is probably a spiral, in which distance is the arc length, and my unified field theory is one of the two complex dimensions.

  The minus sign doesn’t get you “anti-directionality”, (which would be parallel but opposite). You took my prompt in a somewhat consistent direction but I was misleading in making you head that way. Riemanninan rotations are weird and I can’t tell whether you are working with euclidean rotations, whether you have yet to incorporate the riemannian weirdness or you have another take on the weirdness. I don’t example know whether it makes sense to use 360 degrees when talking about boosts. If you do 36 10 degree rotations and get back to where you started. But you can take a small/​moderate boost and you can keep doing it for a very long time without it “wrapping around”.

  So this is where the “We need to consider rotation as hyperbolic” approach comes in. A ten degree rotation from one frame of reference is not a ten degree rotation from another frame of reference; frames of reference won’t agree on how far a given rotation is. From the perspective of an object inside space-time, I think you have to think of rotation as hyperbolic. When I think about these things, however, I’m usually thinking about them from a perspective I can only describe as outside all frames of reference.

  That said, the space-time relationship I am attempting to describe is definitely not Euclidean.

  I mention Matryoshka dolls; my view of time is something like nesting Matryoshka dolls. Consider the event horizon of a black hole, notice that it is the surface of a 3-sphere (two dimension making the obvious surface of a sphere, plus a distance dimension); now “unroll” the event horizon’s distance dimension along the dimension that is directional with the distance dimension of the event horizon. The other two dimensions remain closed—you have three dimensions, made up of one “linear” dimension and two closed dimensions. However, we didn’t actually unroll that third dimension, we more … mapped it onto a linear dimension, so it still has curvature (also it wasn’t precisely a closed dimension like the other two in the first place, it was more like the desuspension of a closed dimension). As we move away from the black hole, our mapping moves in a loop. Relative to our linear direction we have mapped onto, curvature is positive for part of the loop, and negative for part of the loop; this curvature is “impressed” upon space-time itself. So the “structure” of the black hole is, through this mapping, infinitely superimposing itself on spacetime as we move away. (But I think that maybe thinking of the black hole as the “real” structure, which is duplicated/​imprinted outward from itself, is wrong; the black hole is this repeated structure in its entirety).

  Time, then, is sometimes anti-directional, and sometimes directional, with respect to distance, as a function of distance. When it’s anti-directional, time is bent towards the object; with it’s directional, time is bent away from the object.

  Or we could express all that as rotation-of-rotation; the rotation of space-time itself is rotating, as we move away from the black hole.

  If any of that makes sense, which I kind of doubt.

  If you are working from an euclidean standpoint then it will surprise you that taking all the events that are equidistant from a central event do not form a sphere. Your current language suggests that you use terminology with that kind of assumtion.

  ...huh. No, I don’t mean a Euclidean sphere. Or, above, a Euclidean 3-sphere, although maybe the surface of a 3-sphere remains at least approximately correct, I’d have to think about that.

  We can talk about delta-Vs ie changes in velocity but that doesn’t lend to rotation language. To the extent that we use a rotation understanding numbers don’t make sense.

  True, I think. Well, they can make sense, but it’d probably require the hyperbolic version of rotation in order to make sensible use of numbers.

  There is a thing where black holes make time and spcae reverse roles. I don’t know whether you diverge from that or have a unconvetional grab of it.

  Maybe unconventional? Strictly speaking it doesn’t matter if you start with two space dimensions and one time dimension, or three space dimensions, but I think singularities bend time into space, or space into time, “creating” the fourth dimension, which is why it doesn’t act like a properly independent fourth dimension in some respects; it’s just a superimposition. (Also all particles in this are expected to be singularities, or possibly quasi-singularities in the case of neutrinos)

• ACrackedPot 23 Apr 2021 16:25 UTC

  1 point

  on: ACrackedPot’s Shortform

  Assuming all marginal economic growth comes from eliminating unnecessary expenses—increasing efficiency—then companies moving from a high-tax locality to a low-tax locality is, in fact, economic growth.

  Is it a central example of economic growth, or am I just engaging in a rhetorical exercise?

  Well, assuming a diverse ecosystem of localities with different taxes and baskets of goods, I think a company moving from a high-tax locality to a low-tax locality—that is, assuming that we do in fact get something for paying taxes—this means a company is effectively moving from a high-cost plan which covers a wide range of bundled services, to a low-cost plan which covers a smaller range of bundled goods and services—that is, insofar as high taxes pay for anything at all, a company moving to a low-tax locality is reducing their consumption of those goods and services. So, assuming that marginal economic growth arises from reducing consumption, and assuming that taxes are purchasing something, it is fair to describe this as a average, that is, central example of economic growth at the margins.

  Whether or not taxes actually buy anything is, of course, another question entirely. Another question is whether such economic growth in this case is coming at the expense of values we’d rather not sacrifice.

• ACrackedPot 23 Apr 2021 17:32 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Are there op­por­tu­ni­ties for small in­vestors un­available to big ones?

  For some subset of retail scalpers, they can be seen as taking on the risk of engaging in low-trust e-commerce; I can certainly beat the prices I pay for many of the goods I purchase, but doing so greatly increases my risk profile to, for example, somebody stealing my identity /​ credit card information.

  For others, they provide a kind of availability arbitrage, by providing access to the same goods across multiple websites; I can pick the e-commerce portal I want to use, and trust that retail scalpers will ensure the goods I want to purchase will make it available there.

  And for yet others, they are backing up purchases with their own reputation—pretty much every large retail company is reselling goods they purchased from companies in China which a buyer would be dubious about purchasing from; Etsy is full of resellers of Chinese goods in this fashion.

  And on the subject of Etsy, there’s also the dubious service of X-laundering; one example being ethical laundering, where a reseller sells goods from companies that people wouldn’t purchase from themselves for ethical reasons; another example being status-good laundering, where a reseller sells goods that people purchase with the plausible misconception that the seller is handcrafting them. In all of these cases, the reseller is performing a service with regard to the original seller, and in some of these cases, the reseller may be performing a service for the end-consumer as well.

  There’s a wide variety of defenses for the behavior, basically.

• ACrackedPot 23 Apr 2021 17:58 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: ACrackedPot’s Shortform

  I think that line of argument proves too much; anytime anybody consumes less of a good, the seller has less ability to buy and sell things, where the buyer has more ability to buy and sell things; the government isn’t a special case here. More, the reversal of this argument is just the broken window fallacy with a reversal of the status quo.

• ACrackedPot 23 Apr 2021 20:40 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Charlie Steiner’s comment on: A Crack­pot Physics: Time, Spe­cial Rel­a­tivity, and Why Bother?

  Well, you sure weren’t falsely advertising :)

  I try to be accurate.

  I think you’ve got SR wrong, obv. Maybe because you’re not imagining changes of reference frame to mix time and space coordinates for far-away places?

  What’s entertaining is that I’d say this is basically a (considerable) rephrase of my criticism of the way people generally handle special relativity. So I am completely in agreement here if we’re talking about “my model of the way other people model special relativity”.

  So “length-contracting” your way to alpha centauri looks like moving a point that is in your future lightcone but very far away, until it’s directly in your future direction (you’ll go straight there in free-fall).

  This, right here, is incredibly frustrating, because I think this is exactly what I’m referring to by velocity-as-rotation-in-time. The direction an object moves is, from its perspective, the future; it is the direction of time. “Moving a point that is in your future lightcone” is rotating which direction “time” points at, until “time” points at, for example, Alpha Centauri.

  Except relativity; from your perspective it is the rest of the universe whose time is rotating, and it is Alpha Centauri’s future which is pointed, partially, at you; your future is still pointed firmly in the direction of time itself, since obviously you can’t move. The speed at which you move, or rather the speed at which Alpha Centauri moves towards you, is determined by the angle between Alpha Centauri’s future cone and your own. (That is, the more Alpha Centauri’s future cone is pointed at time, rather than at you, the slower it moves in space, and the faster it moves in time).

  The reason you can’t use this to set an absolute reference frame is because the lorentz transformation effect moves things in both time and space, in a way that means the “present distance” (in the way that you think is the present in your reference frame) will be smallest precisely when you are stationary relative to it

  I don’t understand what you mean by present distance; do you mean distance in a unified concept of space and time? (I handle this particular problem in my crackpot nonsense by insisting that the time dimension is spacelike in proportion to velocity, sort of; so the distance “lost” to length contraction is regained in some portion of the distance-in-time becoming distance-in-space. If that makes sense. Is this analogous to this concept?)

  The other thing I’d argue against here is drawing too much from the copernican principle. Not thinking our scale is special doesn’t have to mean we have strong evidence that all scales are the same—we could be equally virtuous copernicans just be being uncertain about the laws of physics at different scales in a symmetrical way. Then if we do experiments and see differences at different scales, we can update that uncertainty to learn about the world.

  I think I can break the claim down into a weak version, and a strong version:

  The weak version: “Every scale will have laws of physics.”

  The strong version: “Every scale will have the same laws of physics.”

  I’m pretty sure even the weak version rules out quantization, since if there is quantization, then there is a scale below which nothing meaningfully exists.

• ACrackedPot 26 Apr 2021 23:33 UTC

  1 point

  on: ACrackedPot’s Shortform

  “Goal-oriented behavior” is actually pretty complicated, and is not, in fact, a natural byproduct of general AI. I think the kinds of tasks we currently employ computers to do are hiding a lot of this complexity.

  Specifically, what we think of as artificial intelligence is distinct from motivational intelligence is distinct from goal-oriented behaviors. Creating an AI that can successfully play any video game is an entirely different technology stack from creating an AI that “wants” to play video games, which in turn is an entirely different technology stack from creating an AI that translates a “desire” to play video games into a sequence of behaviors which can actually do so.

  The AI alignment issue is noticing that good motivation is hard to get right; I think this needs to be “motivation is going to be hard to do at all, good or bad”; possibly harder than intelligence itself. Part of the problem with AI writing right now is that the writing is, basically, unintentional. You can get a lot further with unintentional writing, but intentional writing is far beyond anything that exists right now. I think a lot of fears come about because of a belief that motivation can arise spontaneously, or that intentionality can arise out of the programming itself; that we might write our desires into machines such that machines will know desire.

  What would it take for GPT-3 to want to run itself? I don’t think we have a handle on that question at all.

  Goal-oriented behaviors, meanwhile, correspond to an interaction between motivation and intelligence that itself is immensely more complicated than either independently.

  ---

  I think part of the issue here is that, if you ask why a computer does something, the answer is “Because it was programmed to.” So, to make a program do something, you just program it to do it. Except this is moving the motivation, and intentionality, to the programmer; or, alternatively, to the person pressing the button causing the AI to act.

  The AI in a computer game does what it does, because it is a program that is running, that causes things to happen. If it’s a first person shooter, the AI is trying to kill the player. The AI has no notion of killing the player, however; it doesn’t know what it is trying to do, it is just a series of instructions, which are, if you think about it, a set of heuristics that the programmer developed to kill the player.

  This doesn’t change if it’s a neural network. AlphaGo is not, in fact, trying to win a game of Go; it is the humans who trained it who have any motivation, AlphaGo itself is just a set of really good heuristics. No matter how good you make those heuristics, AlphaGo will never start trying to win a game, because the idea of the heuristics in question trying to win a game is a category error.

  I think, when people make the mental leap from “AI we have now” to “general AI”, they’re underspecifying what it is they are actually thinking about.

  AI that can solve a specific, well-defined problem.

  AI that can solve a well-defined problem. ← This is general AI; a set of universal problem-solving heuristics satisfies this criteria.

  AI that can solve a poorly-defined problem. ← This, I think, is what people are afraid of, for fear that somebody will give it a problem, ask it to solve it, and it will tile the universe in paperclips.

• ACrackedPot 27 Apr 2021 1:32 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: DanielFilan’s comment on: ACrackedPot’s Shortform

  Take two societies. They are exactly identical except in one respect: One has figured out how to manufacture light bulbs using 20% less glass.

  Which society is richer?

  I don’t know what you mean by this.

  https://​​en.wikipedia.org/​​wiki/​​Parable_of_the_broken_window for a basic breakdown. When I say your argument is a reversal of the broken window fallacy, I’m saying your argument amounts to the idea that, in a society in which people routinely break windows, and this is a major source of economic activity, people shouldn’t stop breaking windows, on account of all the economic activity it generates.

• ACrackedPot 29 Apr 2021 16:36 UTC

  1 point

  on: On Ch­ester­ton’s Fence

  The evolution-institution framing is a useful one, and the metaphor, I think, extends further than that.

  Not all evolutionary mechanisms are costly, in a certain sense—the major maintenance cost is informational. If an evolved mechanism doesn’t get used, it doesn’t necessarily get selected against, but it also doesn’t get selected for; the mechanism can be eroded by informational degradation /​ entropy. Or it can be repurposed for some new issue.

  The same is true of institutions, and we can observe it happening; we should expect chemical disasters every so often, just because the regulatory apparatus that ensures that chemical disasters don’t occur, is renewed only when they do occur. Funding is one mechanism for this—maybe funding never decreases, it just doesn’t keep up, until a disaster occurs. But also institutional drift—without chemical disasters to keep the public eye on the regulatory institution, the institution’s purpose is gradually going to drift away from preventing chemical disasters, and drift towards the interests of the people running it (ensuring they have comfortable jobs, for instance), as one form of repurpose—but it could be repurposed to deal with some new issue as well.

  Which is to say, the original adaptation—or the institution—could be serving another purpose entirely when it is needed again, and not actually be able to fulfill the requirements for which it was originally developed. More, the new purpose could be important enough that you can’t just switch back to the original purpose.

  One ramification is that Chesterton’s Fence doesn’t necessarily apply, because the thing that was put in the war chest, by the time you need it again, may not even be in there anyways. More, there may be pieces that are maladaptive to the new purpose, since the structure was created to fulfill a different purpose.

• ACrackedPot 30 Apr 2021 14:33 UTC

  10 points

  on: [Let­ter] Re: Ad­vice for High School

  Personally, the thing I find people constantly lacking in isn’t raw mental horsepower, or pattern recognition, or any of the things IQ generally maps to.

  It’s just being willing to think.

  When I was younger, I wanted to meet the smart people. I’ve met the smart people since then, and they’re not any more willing to think than anyone else; if anything, smart people are more frustrating to interact with.

  My username, and my posts, may hint at a particular interpretation of the above statements. I’m not talking about that, although those kinds of interactions are no more immune to the phenomenon than anything else. I’m talking about the user, who is fully capable of writing their own SQL, who routinely sends said SQL to me for editing after running into efficiency issues with it—and who, when I send back the edited SQL with explanations of why each change was made, will then, a week later, send me SQL containing the exact same mistakes.

  The thing you want is not somebody who is very smart; in fact, I think selecting for “very smart” is likely to select away from actually interesting thinkers. The thing you want is somebody who is willing to be wrong, over and over and over again, in different ways. The people who go into fields where the very smart people are, I think, tend to be the sort of people who want to find out the right answer so they don’t have to think anymore. You want people who aren’t afraid to look foolish.

  If you’re looking for interesting thinkers, and you spend your time looking for smart people, you’re going to look right past all the genuinely interesting thinkers, because interesting thinkers spend most of their time thinking being horribly wrong. People who want to be right can’t afford to think interesting thoughts—because most interesting thoughts are, when you get down to it, incorrect. Being at the edge of the map of truth means spending most of your time being wrong; once you start being right, it’s time to move on, because there’s nothing left to explore.

Mo­ral Privilege

• ACrackedPot 30 Apr 2021 15:14 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: niplav’s comment on: [Let­ter] Re: Ad­vice for High School

  I think that’s a somewhat more literal interpretation than I was aiming for; what I’m gesturing at is also partially conveyed in the final paragraph, where I talk about willingness to be wrong.

  If what you’re thinking about is easy, what this translates to, I think, is that it’s easy to be right. If you’re wrong most of the time, then it’s not actually very easy.

  This is not to say you should think with the intent to be wrong—that’s just another way of doing things the easy way, and is also, I suppose, another way of taking what I’m saying more literally than I intend it. This is a difficult set of concepts to convey, but—if you’re unwilling to struggle, you’re unwilling to think, in the sense that I mean.

• ACrackedPot 30 Apr 2021 17:09 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Josh Smith-Brennan’s comment on: Mo­ral Privilege

  Thank you, and I’d definitely enjoy reading a Newtonian take on morality, when you’re ready to write it.

• ACrackedPot 30 Apr 2021 18:52 UTC

  7 points

  on: [ACX Linkpost] A Modest Pro­posal for Republicans

  I think you may be doing yourself a disservice if you haven’t read the Substack comments in this case; not because the arguments are good, exactly, but because of what they imply about the kind of equivocation that takes place in our society, and the reasons for it.

  Summarizing the comment dynamic which I personally found illuminating: A number of Republican-oriented commenters arguing Republicans are already doing this, have already being doing this for years; a number of Republican-oriented commenters arguing this is antithetical to all of their beliefs and Scott Alexander only suggests this because he doesn’t understand Republicans at all; Democrat-oriented commenters saying that they’d be a lot more receptive to Republicans if they did this, and other Democrat-oriented commenters saying that this would undermine any credibility the Republicans have left.

• ACrackedPot 30 Apr 2021 21:47 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Timothy Johnson’s comment on: Mo­ral Privilege

  One high-level summary that occurs to me is that “trying to solve problems sometimes makes them worse”—but I think you meant something more specific than that.

  Yes.

  Consider “value” as meaning “moral value” for convenience in the following scenario: Imagine a straw-environmentalist, who values reduced CO2, and who also values regulation on industry (for its own sake). From this straw perspective, regulations which reduce CO2 are a total win. Supposing you value reducing CO2 and disvalue regulation, this is a trade-off between two values.

  With respect to a proposal to regulate CO2, the straw environmentalist is in a position of relative moral privilege to you. In a Democracy, the majority moral position confers a specific privileged position—whereas in a monarchy, those who share the moral values of the monarch may enjoy a specific privileged position, in that their moral values are expressed in society, and they can reasonably expect to not have to make any meaningful trade-offs in terms of their values, and any suggestion of such may seem outrageous from their perspective.