My best guess is that the book considers cake-eating to be trivial (just both eat cake), and is therefore not worried about even thinking about it, so it slipped the list.
Ben
Karma: 441
It is abrupt, but to me that wasn’t a bad thing. If them arriving had taken an extra x paragraphs but the story worked out exactly the same way I think that for me that would be worse not better. If there was some clever way of hinting them earlier maybe. The solar flare works quite well for that.
Possibly. I had great fun with the first half of this story, and then I saw where the scroll thingy on my screen was and so stopped with the intention of coming back for the second half. (Which I just did. Second half also great fun!) I don’t think its a flaw in the story, I think that it might just be that its length puts it as a bit of an outlier in terms of webpage reading.
Solar flares are a great plot device for “I need some machine to malfunction”.
Maybe (to make it more similar to nuclear war):
Lesswrong/sneerclub each have a button to take down the other for the day.
Once pressed the other site is taken down, after a 15 minute delay (so mutual destruction is possible if return fire happens within 15mins).
People would spend the whole day^[1] going back and forth between the two sites saying “look, one of them says they have already fired, we have to shoot NOW, before we go down.”
We don’t even need a mechanically introduced false alarm system, I think people getting hyped and misreading/misrepresenting comments on the other site would do enough.
[1] Or, at least the day until 00.15.01 am, when the inevitable first strike lands.
Thank you. I would love to see that rationalfic take on the idea!
If we calibrate so that “taking down the homepage” (redirects to 404 error or whatever it is) for 24 hours is of badness 1 (goodness = −1).
Then the “game over” page is of badness <1 (maybe 0.75?).
Then the whole red-button game is fun, and gives people (like both of us) something interesting to talk about, which is worth some goodness (-X badness). Plus the homepage might be down for less than 24 hours.
So they think : X >~ 0.75
IE The Lesswrong team appear to have decided that the fun of the game (playing/speculating) is worth more than a few hours of homepage plus the time spent implementing the game.
Thank you. You are right, that bit is very Black Mirror-ish.
Thanks for pointing out the typo. Should now be fixed.
That sounds like a wonderful way of managing the transition. Very glad you enjoyed the story.
The Redaction Machine
I think the “local governments might say no” angle is entirely hypothetical anyway. Has any government said no, is it likely that any government will say no? Most malaria-prone countries dedicate significant government funding and resources to mosquito-destroying programs. I suspect most would very happily pay for a gene drive if it was offered to them.
But enormous resources are already used destroying local mosquito populations. In many countries water in swamps is covered with a layer of oil to stop mosquitos breeding in it. Helicopters and planes I think sometimes spray insecticides over forests. In Singapore and parts of Malaysia these kinds of measures have successfully eliminated the local mosquitos.
A gene drive might be cheaper and more effective (and with less side effects) than blanketing the water with oil and the air with insecticides.
Malaria deaths are a crazy high number. How bad would the ecological side-effects need to be to make it not worthwhile?
Those people may be the same 4-5% of people who give the “Yes, shapeshifting lizardmen run the world” answer in the surveys discussed in one of the earlier articles of this series.
Related to this questions is this youtube video, which I think you might find very interesting.
In this video (or perhaps a related one from the same person) they explore the idea of space getting extremely cold at long-times when the cosmic microwave background is much more red-shifted than it is today. In contrast to your idea they actually argue that all that cold is a good thing. A cold computer can run the same calculations with less energy. They go as far as to propose that this hypothetical civilisation will lie dormant until the universe has grown colder, as this allows the rest-mass energy of their black hole to simulate a larger number of virtual people, than they could have simulated had they started in our relatively hot age.
I think there will be feedback, but that it won’t necessarily be a bad thing.
Today most fiction produced by humans is based strongly on the writer’s experience with other fiction, not just there personal lived experience (although obviously that contributes too). Perhaps in distant pre-history there were works of fiction composed by people who had experienced almost no fiction themselves, but that was long ago.
Similarly, all the AI images now are based on non-AI images. But when the loop closes that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. An author reading some books is probably good for their writing.
One customer has no responsibility to ensure another customer’s experience is satisfactory. One could also point out that a customer (traditionally) has no responsibility to ensure that the staff are satisfied.
But I would say that one human being should consider how their actions might impact on other human beings—even if they happen to the customer. If I am in a restaurant it is possible for me to notice that my loud speaking is annoying to another person and tone it down. By all means recline your seat, I don’t care. But please don’t adopt the general policy that when you are the customer you can suddenly stop thinking about how your actions might effect others.
Based on the passion people show on twitter (main thread) maybe an airline that was explicitly anti-recline might drive away a few customers (or more likely get hate on twitter from a few people who weren’t customers anyway). Similar for pro-recline.
I suspect the answer is that, for most airlines, its more like no-one even knows whose job this is. eg. Cabin crew breaks up an argument, wonders if an airline policy is a good idea. They assume some person in head office might be thinking about this. Back in head office they all fly business class and are unaware of the issue entirely. Not only is no one thinking about it but the airline doesn’t even have channels of command/communication about who would decide that policy, or decide to have a meeting to pick a policy.
Its a nice idea, and I suspect that in the far future more sophisticated versions of roughly this kind of thing will happen.
But it won’t happen soon. This is the high fruit on the geography tree. It might be possible to develop a desert, but it would be much more cost effective to develop places that already have fresh water/soil etc. There are still lots of forests, jungles and grassy plains out there to be developed first.
I am really curious what would happen if a test was performed where the inverse rule was used (flip all yeses to noes). You are told 2-4-6 does NOT obey a rule. If this changes the outcome then it suggests the asymmetry is less in the logic people are applying and more in an asymmetry in how the perceive the words yes and no.
A nice review, the book sounds like an interesting read.
“Protecting ordinary people is more profitable than criminals, who by definition enter conflicts on purpose.” > This is a bad argument. X is a bigger market that Y does not imply that X is more profitable. If I am founding a new security agency I might see a gap in the market for one that serves criminals, it saves me competing with all the many agencies that help nice people. Criminals may enter conflicts on purpose, but maybe they will pay a premium.
That is an interesting approach. I would be worried that transmitting the relevant facts down from you to you but without the lived experience might do strange things to your personality. As an extreme example , you wake up one morning and your beloved partner is gone, but your past self has provided a convenient dossier on how she was a complete monster and breaking up with her was totally correct. It reminds me a little of the relay-solving study someone shared a while ago (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DWgWbXRfXLGHPgZJM/solving-math-problems-by-relay), although for life, not problem solving. I suppose once your memory uploader/downloader system works then you are sorted, although at that point maybe you can run your mind in software, so your body becomes more like a piece of hardware you sometimes use.