chasmani

Karma: 10

chasmani 13 Jan 2021 11:21 UTC
−1 points
on: Neurocryopreservation vs whole-body preservation
With neuropreservation you might also lose the sense of embodiment, of being in a body and the body being a part of you. That could be extremely traumatic to the point where you wouldn’t want to come back without your body. It is unclear whether that could be successfully countered using a “grown” body or a sophisticated simulation if you are being uploaded.

chasmani 19 Dec 2020 14:34 UTC
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: No, Newspeak Won’t Make You Stupid
Good point. I think it would depend on how useful the word is in describing the world. If your culture has very different norms between “boyfriend/girlfriend” and fiancé then a replacement for fiancé would likely appear.

I suppose that on one extreme you would have words that are fundamental to human life or psychology e.g. water, body, food, cold. These I’m sure would reappear if banned. Then on the other extreme you have words associated with somewhat arbitrary cultural behaviour e.g. thanksgiving, tinsel, Twitter, hatchback. These words may not come back if the thing they are describing is also banned.

Uncle/father is an interesting one. Those different meanings could be described with compound words. Father could be “direct makuakane” and uncle “brother makuakane”, or something like that. We already use compound words in family relations in English like “grandfather” whereas Spanish it is “abuelo”.

chasmani 18 Dec 2020 17:16 UTC
3 points
on: No, Newspeak Won’t Make You Stupid
You might be interested in this paper, it supports the idea of a constant information processing rate in text. “Different languages, similar coding efficiency: Comparable information rates across the human communicative niche”, Coupe, Mi Oh, Dediu, Pellegrino.. 2019, Science Advances.
I would agree that language would likely adapt to newspeak by simply using other compound words to describe the same thing. Within a generation or two these would then just become the new word. Presumably the Orwellian government would have to continually ban these new words. Perhaps with enough pressure over enough years the ideas themselves would be forgotten, which is perhaps Orwell’s point.
I think the claim that sophisticated word use is caused by intelligence signalling requires more evidence. It is I’m sure one aspect of the behaviour. But a wider vocabulary is also beneficial in terms of being able to more clearly and efficiently disambiguate and communicate ideas. This could be especially true I think when communicating across contexts—having context specific language may help prevent misunderstandings that would arise with a more limited vocabulary. It would be interesting to try and model that with ideas from information theory.

chasmani 18 Dec 2020 16:58 UTC
2 points
in reply to: waveBidder’s comment on: How long does it take to become Gaussian?
I was thinking something similar. I vaguely remember that the characteristic function proof includes an assumption of n being large, where n is the number of variables being summed. I think that allows you to ignore some higher order n terms. So by keeping those in you could probably get some way to quantify how “close” a resulting distribution is to Gaussian. And you could relate that back to moments quite naturally as well.

chasmani 31 Oct 2020 16:43 UTC
8 points
on: Babble challenge: 50 consequences of intelligent ant colonies
1. I will become famous by telling the world this news
2. I can probably get a professor job off the back of this research
3. The open question of why they became intelligent will lead to alien conspiracy theories
4. Religions will claim that God must have done this
5. Some people will say this is proof we are in a simulation
6. New businesses will start up to exploit the intelligent ants
7. Interfaces will be built to communicate with the ants
8. Some people will say it is a conspiracy theory and the ants aren’t really smart
9. The research will lead to advances in swarm computing
10. I’ll doubt my research and have to check it over again
11. We will need to make peace with ant kind—they would win in a war
12. Ant kind will start communicating with each other and making their own culture
13. Governments might try and stop the ants from communicating
14. Some people will ally with the ants, running secret anthills
15. Someone will develop a way for ants to access the internet
16. Will the ants have emotions?
17. New religions will form that incorporate ant and human kind
18. We can send ant colonies in spaceships more easily than people
19. Ant colony pilots
20. Ants will take over some areas of the economy that they are suited to
21. People will protest about ants taking their jobs
22. We can send GM ant colonies to Mars and other planets
23. We can use ants to spy on people
24. Eating ants will become a weird fetish for some people
25. Anti-ant areas will be setup with strict regulations to prevent ants from getting in
26. Governments will suspect each other of creating the intelligent ants
27. Ant colonies will start to work together, creating mega-colonies
28. The entire Amazon will become a giant ant hive mind
29. There will be peace accords between different species of ants
30. People will investigate if bees and other hive type species are also intelligent
31. There will be an ant made novel
32. Studying ants will lead to leaps forward in AI
33. Someone will run an ant Turing test
34. Adam Ant will have a pop revival
35. Some people will deify the ants and live by their dictates
36. Some ant colonies will become particularly famous
37. It will become fashionable to have an ant colony companion in your home
38. Artists will collaborate with ants to generate intricate 3d sculptures
39. The first ant politician will be elected
40. There will be a human ant war
41. Some people will move to cold places that have less ants
42. Alex Jones will invent some conspiracy theory about ants
43. The ant news will be drowned out by the US election
44. There will be films made about ant kind
45. There will be human-ant romances
46. People will develop pheromone sprays to influence the ants
47. Some ant hives will become addicted to pheromone sprays
48. The bill of human rights will be extended to include ant rights
49. Studying ant hives will lead to advances in neuroscience
50. Whole new university departments will be created to study ants

chasmani 25 Oct 2020 22:19 UTC
3 points
on: The bads of ads
I like to think of advertising as commercial propaganda. That is technically what it is. Whereas political propaganda’s purpose may be to influence people to support a political belief, commercial propaganda is to influence people to support a commercial enterprise.
People tend to think of political propaganda as something from World War 2 and authoritarian regimes. But it was used in the West and it never went away. It just became more sophisticated over time and a part of that was re-branding it to “spin” or “public relations”. The original word is useful because it is accurate and it highlights the obvious negative consequences of the practice.