It’s indeed the case that I haven’t been attracted back to LW by the moderation options that I hoped might accomplish that. Even dealing with Twitter feels better than dealing with LW comments, where people are putting more effort into more complicated misinterpretations and getting more visibly upvoted in a way that feels worse. The last time I wanted to post something that felt like it belonged on LW, I would have only done that if it’d had Twitter’s options for turning off commenting entirely.
So yes, I suppose that people could go ahead and make this decision without me. I haven’t been using my moderation powers to delete the elaborate-misinterpretation comments because it does not feel like the system is set up to make that seem like a sympathetic decision to the audience, and does waste the effort of the people who perhaps imagine themselves to be dutiful commentators.
Imprecisely multiplying two analog numbers should not require 10^5 times the minimum bit energy in a well-designed computer.
A well-designed computer would also use, say, optical interconnects that worked by pushing one or two photons around at the speed of light. So if neurons are in some sense being relatively efficient at the given task of pumping thousands upon thousands of ions in and out of a depolarizing membrane in order to transmit signals at 100m/sec—every ion of which necessarily uses at least the Landauer minimum energy—they are being vastly far from optimally efficient.
The moment you see ions going in and out of a depolarizing membrane, and contrast that to the possibility of firing a photon down a fiber, you ought to be done asking whether or not biology has built an optimally efficient computer. It actually isn’t any more complicated than that. You are driving yourself further from sanity if you then try to do very complicated reasoning about how it must be close to the limit of efficiency to pump thousands of ions in and out of a membrane instead.