Just this guy, you know?
Dagon
Karma: 5,840
Would you clarify a bit what claims you’re making? Is this a legal question (in what jurisdications is a copyright claim likely to hold up based on plot analysis when the text content is not copied)? Or a broader IP advice (copyright isn’t sufficient, you should patent or trademark parts of your work as well)? Or something else (a moral claim—this is legal (defined as: courts don’t provide relief), but shouldn’t be done)?
I agree with, but am confused by, your description of important differences between the book, along with important similarities. I expect MANY readers enjoyed both, and bought both. Which rather reduces the reasoning for a court to enforce royalties on or prevent publication of the later book.
People liked Brown’s book not just because of the meaningful ending that revealed the story as an allegory about the pursuit of knowledge and love. They liked it because they felt like they were learning something about religious symbols. I was fascinated to learn that Venus traces out the shape of a star relative to the ecliptic every eight years and I also enjoyed the few pages Brown wrote about PHI.
In constast, I liked Dunn’s book because of the plot and because I felt like I learned something about how banking criminals operated. Nevertheless, after reading both books, it is clear to me that Brown borrowed heavily from Dunn and lied about it. He used Dunn’s story as a template or road map and the lying is where he crossed a line, in my estimation. Then again, maybe his publisher wouldn’t allow him to tell the truth. I’ve heard that they can be bullies.
I don’t know much about book publishing, but in software, it’s well-known that algorithms are not covered under copyright. Expression and literal code is. Algorithms and designs can sometimes be patented, but there’s shockingly little case law about where the lines are drawn. Similarly in boardgames—one can copyright text, graphics, names, etc. But not the actual mechanics—there are TONS of copycats of any popular game. They mostly don’t succeed because they’re not actually an improvement, and there’s no need being served by them.
I’d expect the same of books—significant chunks of text are covered by copyright, but not plotlines or even plot event sequences. Unlike boardgames, though, there’s a whole lot of authorial variation and expression in the prose that describes and reveals the plot, so there is value in reading multiple superficially-similar novels.
I would like this better if you’d clarified which decisions or actions you’re evaluating. I’d also prefer you not imply that “is it ethical” is a question that makes any sense without more context. And finally, you should at least mention other explorations of population ethics, including Parfit’s Repugnant Conclusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_addition_paradox). That said, it’s always interesting to hear different positions on the topic, and I don’t want to discourage that. You’re clear that it’s ok (or maybe even good) to seek life extension in the current world. And you imply that there is some potential future state where it’s not OK. Where would you draw the line?
Note that your exploration doesn’t require immortality, only the decision of whether a given set of resources is used to enhance/extend one life, or to enhance/create/extend another. This is no different than any other resource allocation question, is it? Specifically, does your exploration address anything different from “if you choose to live another day, you use resources that would otherwise be available to someone else”? And is that significantly different from “if you buy a latte rather than drinking tap water, you use resources that would otherwise be available to someone else”?
The math of very wide value ranges requires some assumptions about “compared to what” that it’s necessary to calculate in order to make good decisions. Putting the calculations together to figure out what “a bit” is—what’s the amount you should spend on which lottery this week?
I suspect you’ll find that the lottery is better than buying junk food, and worse than almost any other charitable or durable-value use of money.
It’s slightly different in philosophy and in linguistics/conversational norms (as I understand). Conversationally, the principle of charity is to assume the kindest interpretation, in order not to derail the conversation. Philosophically, it’s to assume the strongest interpretation, in order to understand what claims about the world make sense.
In neither case would I recommend “popularity” as the basis for interpretation, except as a prior before you know anything about the topic or claimant.
It’s an important point to remember, for this and other policy evaluations (labor unions come to mind), that it’s very rare to find a serious academic who will say “good” or “bad” in a vacuum. The questions are “how much” and “under what conditions”. In environments with long-established and slow-to-change property ownership, and a history of tenant maltreatment, interventions like rent control and eviction limits and enforced mediation before court are perhaps necessary to solve problems. In environments where it’s pretty easy to enter and exit the rental market, and tenants have a bit of power because empty units suck, probably less regulation keeps things moving.
And, of course, in the real world where government causes a shortage by preventing creation of housing, and it’s hard to become a landlord because of all the regulation, and as a result tenants are mistreated because there are many more of them than spots available, there is no good answer. Rent control is the wrong tool to address a supply problem.
I don’t think there IS much low-hanging fruit. Seemingly-easy things are almost always more complicated, and the credit for deceptively-hard things skews the wrong way: promising and failing hurts a lot (didn’t even do this little thing), promising and succeeding only helps a little (thanks, but what important things have you done?).
Much better, in politics, to fail at important topics and get credit for trying.
Opponents are not all equal.
Nor is their inequality linear. You should also reject it if you’re near-even with this person, and there is a larger gap between you and the other players (in either direction). But really, it’s all down to expected value—take your distribution of possible paths through the game, conditional on each side of this decision. Take the one with the highest mean.
Aside: you are misusing “utility” in this example. What is offered is not utilons, but resources that (may or may not) impact the utility you get from the final position of the game.
What does “academic consensus” mean, in operational terms? The VAST majority of papers aren’t for or against rent control, they’re an exploration of impact of specific policies on specific populations (the better ones also include comparison to other policies on perhaps-comparable populations, and models of impact for various dimensions of policy). Whether that impact is “good” or “bad” is rarely explored (though many do show that the impact is often misaligned with some stated goals).
I don’t know how to measure how complete the consensus is, but there is general agreement among economists that artificially reducing prices will reduce the motivation to create more supply. I’ve not seen any dissent from the framing that it’s a forced subsidy from owner to tenant, but I don’t think there’s a broad consensus about whether and when that’s desirable.
Since the virus grows exponentially (when R>1), and it seems unlikely that it’ll be actually eradicated (due to outliers on infection times, groups who isolate together, but slowly transmit it among the group, and simple leaks in enforcement/adoption), it’s best to think of this kind of intervention as “how much does it reduce the infectious population”?
It seems likely that, with the vaccines rolling out (too slowly, but happening), any significant reduction in the spread makes the final herd immunity (actual end-game for this) contain a higher ratio of vaccinated to formerly-infected, and a lower absolute number of dead and a lower amount of long-term impacted. So you get much of the value, even if the disease is only set back a few months, not fully eliminated.
Which means, you can look at the reasons that this isn’t happening (in most US and EU regions) even enough to slow the spread, and just extend them to why we haven’t shut down enough to stop it entirely. I think 4 is a very hard constraints, with 3 being close, and they give cover to the violators of 1, making policing effectively impossible. I also think you have to dive pretty deep into 1 to explain who’s doing the policing, and why they’re willing to go out and police (which does mean shooting and being shot at, right?) rather than staying safe at home.
Wait. Interpreting by (your perception of) popularity seems to be less truth-seeking than the most sensible OR that strongest (see https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/steelmanning ).
If you’re talking about using it as evidence that at least one person makes this claim, then I see your point—you should consider all possible interpretations of an argument, weighted by likelihood that the person is making that specific claim. That likelihood is subject to Bayesean calculations. “popularity” is a fine prior, but you ALWAYS have additional evidence to alter your weighting of probability from that point.
Inoreader lets me subscribe to the feed (URL https://astralcodexten.substack.com/feed/, which looks like standard RSS to me), so it doesn’t seem that Substack is intentionally limiting access to their site.
IMO, this post should disable voting—LW mods should remove it, or should flag it in some way so it can be viewed by people who might need to see it (those who directly interact with the involved person(s)), but probably not considered part of the LW site or canon.
Definitely recommend the newsletter. It’s definitely more focused on the finance world (banking and stock mechanisms) than “typical econblogger stuff”. This focus and specificity makes it very interesting, and affects my modeling of the world more directly than a broader look at “the economy”.
One size does not fit all. “the public” is not homogenous, and individuals have very different ability and tolerance for crafting their presentation to different audiences, and different audiences react differently to various dimensions of presentation. This is almost unrelated to how “true” the presentation is.
I don’t think there’s any way to avoid some amount of strategizing. Most people do it fairly unconsciously, and until very recently in human history it wasn’t commonly acceptable to even ask the question. Arguably, this question is the primary driver of human brain evolution.
Don’t forget the Greater Fool theory (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/greaterfooltheory.asp). Stocks go up because investors expect them to go up, and those investors’ purchases actually drive the price up.
There is some underlying truth in terms of dividends and stock buybacks (effectively a dividend, but paid by reverse-dilution), but the vast (VAST) majority of invested dollars are fully disconnected from any actual business outcomes, except by the publicity and expectations channel.
Insofar as “total karma should try to approximate ideal ‘Rationalist Social Status’”
Cool, that’s a good goal. The ideal approach to implementation would be propose the social status of, say 2000 randomly-selected posters, and then to run a regression over lots of variables to figure out how to predict that from posts. I don’t think that starting with “a function of votes on posts and comments” is likely to get there—too many other dimensions play into it.
I suspect my karma total is ridiculously high in terms of social status. It’s huge just because I’ve been here a long time.
I think the reference is to the well-accepted cases of intentional (along with likely unintentional) introduction of smallpox to Native American populations, and at least some amount of bubonic-plague-era disposal of bodies near to enemy camps with the intent to spread it.
I don’t think it’s been used much in the modern era—the populations worth attacking are generally advanced enough to require more direct and selective means. I expect this will continue for quite some time—it’ll pick up in terrorism a bit, but organized forces with significant civilian populations to protect will realize that such weapons are too likely to escape the enemy.
There’s probably a middle ground of “semi-infectious” weapons, which can be controlled easily, but not without doing a bunch of damage before it’s understood. Or that infect, for instance, only a specific strain or growing condition of wheat.
Front-page posts don’t necessarily need a multiplier to be more valuable—they already get a lot more visibility,. A larger number of voters will see and consider voting on a top-level or front-page post than any comment or short-form.
A lot comes down to “why do we track accumulations of karma from the past in the first place?” I’d love to see a reasoning for what levels various posters should have, and then backwards-calculate (fit) a scoring mechanism into that.
These are two distinct arguments, both of which are debatable, but should not be combined.
forced institutional schooling is immoral, and should be stopped regardless of consequences.
the dumb system does more harm than good. It should be stopped because of the consequences.
I disagree with #1 (I don’t think it’s comparable to forced labor or race-based enslavement—it’s temporary and fairly straightforward (though not easy) to make exceptions and opt out) for different reasons than I disagree with #2 (I think there are aspects which are harmful, but that the net result is neutral or better).
“immediately”, for a family’s primary home which they can (barely) afford and is close to work and social needs, can be over a year. Being evicted due to changing market conditions is always going to be traumatic.
I very much like this thinking, which is keeping the market conditions favorable to housing consumers, and less favorable to speculators (meaning: investors who don’t actually create or improve supply). It’s far preferable to trying to ignore or suppress the supply/demand/price intersection.