There were probably a huge number of wooden tools that archaeologists have never seen because wood decays.
CronoDAS
Karma: 16,544
I know how this works because my father made a telescope mirror in our basement. (He had to get it silvered professionally, but he did all the glass grinding/polishing himself!)
One thing that humans do better than other primates is throwing. Spears and other stone weapons probably had something to do with this.
(do not take this too seriously)
The model in the paper seemst to assume the conclusion, but perhaps putting term limits on a dictator, if possible, might help with the general problem: it takes a while for the information getting to the dicator to become badly corrupted, so maybe don’t let anyone stay dictator long enough for that to happen? On the other hand, making the dictator run mostly on priors instead of using power to get access to new information has its own set of drawbacks...
Thank you!
Are they easy to lose when they’re not inside a book?
There are stories of people losing their jobs over social media posts—the stories I’ve heard have been about high school teachers getting fired over things like pictures of themselves on Facebook drinking at a party.
Right now I have a substantial amount of assets—most of which would be extremely difficult to liquidate or borrow against—but my income (and expected future income) is fairly low. So term life insurance is not going to be a good way to fund cryonics for me, just like it probably wouldn’t be for a retired person. At the Cryonics Institute, standby costs an additional $45,000 - it would be a lot easier for me to pay $28,000 than $73,000.
[Question] Cryonics without standby services?
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Because humans anticipate becoming old and feeble, and would prefer not to be disenfranchised once that happens.
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Because people who don’t work often have relatives that do work that care about them. The Nazis actually tried this, and got pushback from families when they did try to kill people with severe mental illness and other disabilities.
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As a matter of historical fact, there are lots of examples of certain groups of people being systematically excluded from having property rights, such as chattel slavery, coverture, and unemancipated minors.
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The African slave trade was certainly a self-enriching conspiracy of white people.
Humans have successfully managed to take property away from literally every other animal species. I don’t see why ASIs should give humans any more property rights than humans give to rats.
The backstory here is that my high school changed its start time from 8:10 to 7:40 and I couldn’t cope with that—I was too tired to get up in the morning and trying to go to bed earlier simply resulted in lying in bed awake.
One might very well argue that copyright itself is a government granted monopoly that, under libertarian principles, ought not to exist.
Capitalism in Europe eventually turned out to be pretty bad for Africa, what with the whole “paying people to do kidnappings so you can ship the kidnapping victims off to another continent to work as slaves” thing.
In a world of competing AI-based firms, there will be no one instance that is in a position to acquire all the resources in the universe.
How do you know this? There have been times in Earth’s history in which one government has managed to acquire a large portion of all the available resources, at least temporarily. People like Alexander of Macedon, Genghis Khan, and Napoleon actually existed.
As the original post mentioned, the Industrial Revolution wasn’t very good for horses.
When I was in the position of said 13 year old (although I was actually 15), I was like “Long term? I’m tired of waiting for a long term that never seems to actually come, and according to you, after I’m done with school, all I have to look forward to is a 40 hour a week job that will leave me with even less time to do the things I actually want to do, such as play video games. So I’m going to just have fun now, while I still have the chance, and if everything falls apart on me someday, so be it. You haven’t actually offered me a better alternative.”
My father’s response was something like “Fine. We can’t make you do the work, but the law says that I can get in trouble if you don’t at least physically show up at the school and remain there during the school day, so I will use any method at my disposal, up to and including physical force, to achieve that. And we will also force you to see psychiatrists and other doctors to find out what is wrong with you.”
I am not entirely sure that this is the case.
I once read an article about a woman who had done extraordinary well in a quiz-show style academic competition for college students and then watched a video of her team winning the final round of the championship because she answered all the questions herself, and my immediate reaction was “That was the sexiest thing I’ve ever seen”.