Dirichlet-to-Neumann

Karma: 98

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 22 Jan 2021 18:44 UTC
12 points
on: [Link] Still Alive—Astral Codex Ten
Good news : slate star codex is up again.
Bad news : I’ve been singing “still alive” since this morning and it’s driving me crazy.

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 22 Jan 2021 11:23 UTC
1 point
on: Don’t Fear The Filter
“This is very strange. Consider that if humankind makes it another thousand years, we’ll probably have started to colonize other star systems. Those star systems will colonize other star systems and so on until we start expanding at nearly the speed of light, colonizing literally everything in sight. After a hundred thousand years or so we’ll have settled a big chunk of the galaxy, assuming we haven’t killed ourselves first or encountered someone else already living there.”
There are two assumption here that everybody in the rationalist/EA/AI alignment community seems to take for granted while they seems are least debatable (if not downright false) to me:
1) If we make it to another thousand years, we’ll probably have started to colonize other star systems.
Well, it may turn out it’s a little bit more complicated to go to an other star system than to go to Mars—them being far and so on. Any colony outside of the solar system would necessarily have very limited economic ties with the Earth, since even information would need a few years to be transmitted (good luck managing your Alpha Centauri properties from Earth...) and material goods would be even worse. So the economic interest is not even clear in any non-paperclip maximiser scenario, and that’s assuming galaxy level colonisation is even possible physically (remember that if you are going fast, you will need to slow down, and that the faster you go the heavier you get).

2) “expanding at nearly the speed of light”. This seems downright implausible and ruled out by my understanding of current physic. Light goes fast, you know.

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 22 Jan 2021 10:39 UTC
1 point
on: [Link] Still Alive—Astral Codex Ten
That’s some great news !

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 21 Jan 2021 12:39 UTC
1 point
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: A few thought on the inner ring
Exactly this. The whole point of the Inner Ring (which I did not read, but judging by the review and my knowledge of Lewis/Christian thought and virtue ethic) is that you should aim at the goods that are inherent to your trade or activity (i.e., if you are a coder, writing good code), and not care about social goods that are associated with the activity. Lewis then makes a second claim (which is really a different claim) that you will also reach social goods through sincerely pursuing the inherent goods of your activity.

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 21 Jan 2021 11:20 UTC
4 points
in reply to: remizidae’s comment on: A few thought on the inner ring
Competing in zero sum games rather than looking for positive sum games to play is not good for the world (and probably not good for you either on average, unless you have reason to think you will be better than average at this).

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 15 Jan 2021 13:20 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Piwo’s comment on: The True Face of the Enemy
And it so happened that slavery only disappeared when it was not economically viable any more...

But this is beyond the point. What matters is this:
Slavery is immoral. I’ll contest that the school system is immoral. Now if the point is “people should be free to have the education they want for their children”, I agree wholeheartedly. But the article is not phrased this way. It is phrased in a “the school system on the whole is evil”. I want to push back strongly against this, mainly for the reasons stated above by TAG: self education is impossible for children who don’t have either rare combinations of intellectual dispositions or parents with the cultural, social and economic capital to home school them in a productive way. Even in those cases the education will be in many if not all circumstances more narrow that what is given in most current school system (where a variety of fields are mandatory and you are by necessity confronted to the different world views and opinion of your teachers and schoolmates). I would never have learned maths if I had been home-schooled (and my parents are easily in the top 10% in term of intelligence, culture and wealth).

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 14 Jan 2021 22:42 UTC
3 points
on: Covid 1/14: To Launch a Thousand Shipments
There are two arguments for the two dose policy :
The first is that the priority is to protect the most vulnerable people first, at maximum immunity.
The second is that the vaccine was shown to be highly efficient to protect vaccinated people from developing severe forms of the disease, but that right now it is unclear if vaccinated people may or may not be contagious In this case the vaccine would not offer significant collective immunity while being efficient at giving individual immunity, again suggesting a policy of “two doses first for the most vulnerable”.

None of these two arguments are coherent with a policy of vaccinating young healthy “frontline workers” first (or even medical workers), but we don’t except any governing body to have a coherent policy at this point...

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 14 Jan 2021 14:17 UTC
2 points
in reply to: TAG’s comment on: The True Face of the Enemy
This is a good summary of my objections in a very different form from what I stated below.

I would even go further: I highly doubt the top 20% are all able to learn by themselves with a library and a computer (and almost everyone would at least need directions on what to study). And the bottom 20% is more like the bottom 50%.

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 13 Jan 2021 21:32 UTC
4 points
on: The True Face of the Enemy
Also, Chesterton fence.
I’ll be much more convinced by your description of schools if you manage to describe a somewhat viable alternative system...

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 13 Jan 2021 21:30 UTC
11 points
on: The True Face of the Enemy
Well, I loved school, and I would never have learned the thing I learned outside of it. As someone born from highly educated but totally unscientific parents, I would certainly not have had more than a symbolic education in mathematics and sciences if I had been through some flavour of home-schooling. I got a wide range of teacher quality, with some bad ones making the experience slightly unpleasant and some very good ones having a huge positive impact on my life. I’ve always had trouble socialising, but I highly doubt I would have more occasions to develop social skills outside schools...

Obviously this is no more than anecdotal evidence, but don’t fall for the typical mind fallacy—the current school system is certainly not perfect, but it seems to do its job correctly for a lot of children and amazingly for a few of them.

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 8 Jan 2021 22:27 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: Covid 1/7: The Fire of a Thousand Suns
That was my initial reaction too, but then I thought that when a virus enter a cell (or a traditional attenuated vaccines), it kills the cell when going out, so any mutation that could happen to the infected cell is irrelevant since the cell is destroyed. With a RNA vaccine the cell is not killed (unless it is then killed by our immune system ?).

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 8 Jan 2021 15:54 UTC
2 points
in reply to: agc’s comment on: Covid 1/7: The Fire of a Thousand Suns
Thanks—corrected.

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 8 Jan 2021 0:16 UTC
5 points
on: Covid 1/7: The Fire of a Thousand Suns
I have a genuine question about RNA vaccines (not vaccination in general, RNA vaccines). It’s a concern about vaccine safety, and I post it hidden here because at any other place the result would be people freaking out and getting less likely to get vaccinated if there is actually no reason to be concerned.

First a bit of context. I had a conversation with a friend of my parents. He is a researcher in biology/genetic/aging at the CNRS in France, and as far as I can tell pretty good at his job (based on his career so far).

We discussed RNA vaccines, and he was saying this:
1) The Pfizer/Modena vaccine have obviously no short term side effect so we should just vaccine all old people asap.
2) for younger people it’s less clear, because of the following possibility:
RNA can obviously enter the cell nucleus (that’s RNA function). What is less-well known is that RNA and DNA can sometimes mix. This mean that viral RNA from the vaccine has a chance to insert itself randomly into your DNA. In the short term this is not a problem, but in the long term this means some chances to develop some sort of cancer (or sterility problems) - which may be a problem if young people in their twenties/thirties get a lot of cancer ten years from now.

In my model this is not really a problem, because the odds of developing a cancer due to the vaccine are still very low and the benefit from vaccinations are very high and immediate (and you protect others). But I’d like to know if some of you have sources on this question or have thought about the problem.
(note: he has a long experience of targeting some gene in flies and seeing some random mutations pop out on non-targeted areas—just to say that he knows his stuff about genetics).

(note 2: also thanks Zvi for your great posts !)

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 3 Jan 2021 23:29 UTC
5 points
on: Don’t Use Your Favorite Weapon
I actually think it’s not that hard to build a good argument that will work “for the other side”, but you need to actually try, and for that you need some genuine sympathy of some sort for the opposite position.

In my experience it’s surprisingly enough easier to do with conservatives than liberals (but that may be because being conservative-leaning center myself I’m more familiar with their way of thinking).

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 31 Dec 2020 14:44 UTC
0 points
on: SpaceX will have massive impact in the next decade
Main expected effect : not being able to see unpolluted night sky any more.

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 21 Dec 2020 0:10 UTC
2 points
on: How to eradicate the desire to check time-wasting sites
Do you have a good equivalent for Firefox ?

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 12 Dec 2020 22:11 UTC
3 points
on: Quick Thoughts on Immoral Mazes
I’m not sure I have anything significant to add to jaspax comment above which is excellent and summarize most of my objections to the main post.

So this comment is just here to recommand a book which I think could help make the discussion of the two last points (the ones on engagement with object level reality). It is called “shop class as soulcraft”, by Matthews Crawford, and discuss quite engagingly the different kind of relation-to-the world you can get from different kind of jobs. It is generally a defence of jobs that are often considered low status (main example being a motorcycle repairer) ; it’s main point is that those jobs engage you with the reality of the world, exercise your intelligence and give meaning to your live in a way many white-collared jobs don’t.
It’s also very well written, alternating between solid philosophical and sociological discussions and down-to-earth example out of the author experience.

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 11 Dec 2020 11:29 UTC
11 points
on: Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets—Part 7
Am I the only one who feels like I’m only getting even numbered pages ?

The pathing looks a bit like in the Manuscript found in Saragossa, only with fewer ghosts and threesomes.

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 9 Dec 2020 22:50 UTC
3 points
on: Quick Thoughts on Immoral Mazes
For some reason I can’t see the comments without commenting.

Dirichlet-to-Neumann 8 Dec 2020 10:48 UTC
3 points
on: Why are delicious biscuits obscure?
The most obvious explanation is that home-made biscuits are just better than industrial biscuits—due to better quality ingredients and less concern about transportation/conservation.