Am I alone in actually liking life? Are the rest of my compatriots so eager to die?
Hyena
Given that productivity growth was slow for most of human history, it seems more appropriate to ask why it was so fast for a while. I keep thinking it may have been that manufacturing precision reached a point where we could drink a couple centuries of scientific milkshake.
When I looked at the paper, my impression is that it was a persistent result in the experiment, which would explain publication: the experiment’s results will be public and someone, eventually, will notice this in the data. Better that CERN officially notice this in the data than Random High Energy Physicist. People relying on CERN’s move to publish may want to update to account for this fact.
I think the ethics of farming is another place where problems in utilitarianism crop up.
There’s a Parfitian argument that, since none of these animals would have existed otherwise, then killing them for food is no problem. But this would also apply to farming people, whether for food or chattel slavery, which we find repugnant. Obviously, though, this world is just as utility maximizing as Hanson’s Malthusian em soup universe, neither of which seem particularly “good” (in fact, it is the em soup, just with fleshy people).
I don’t have a “solution” to this, I think it just demonstrates one of the edges of utility theory’s map.
When I read these stories, I always feel guilty. I became non-theist. I simply stopped believing in it; there was no grappling with theological or historical issues, I just stopped believing. A bit flipped one day and I’ve never been able to believe since; I can’t even conceptually access my pre-flip self.
Sometimes I wonder, though, if my version isn’t more true. Everyone else could also be subject to the flip but seek to rationalize it. Later I went through many attempts to “find religion” but couldn’t. I can’t help but womder if lukeprog’s research wasn’t a similar process of post-flip grappling rather than it’s source.
The appropriateness of the post depends entirely on the set of answers asked after. It is therefore incumbent on LessWrongians to answer with PDFs which are rationality-enhancing or which explore its associatd issues.
I always call you all “LessWrongians” or “the people at LessWrong” sometimes also using the word “dudes”.
In grade school, I would not admit mistakes. Ever. As Zetetic pointed out, it was a good way to invite additional torment. If you stood your ground, you looked douchey but you never conceded and so the frustration was less.
In college, I admitted mistakes frequently because admission of mistakes actually brought benefits instead. People didn’t torment you and your admission opened up new pathways. Being humble was a pragmatic virtue.
When I left college, I found out that adults are the worst people I’ve ever dealt with. Status competition was fierce—especially at my government job—and so I never, NEVER, admitted a mistake unless I had planted the mistake for that purpose. If you admitted anything, if you hadn’t staged everything perfectly, it would all be used against you. I learned that there was nothing positive in the world, only negatives. Life as a series of demerits until demise.
I think that’s why people have hardened so far in their positions, even in private: they have learned that admitting mistakes will bring them harm and learning from them will gain them comparatively little.
Just another reason I live on welfare instead of work, I guess.
In general, you would be advised not to say anything on the Internet unless you have thought about it for at least five minutes.
My mop doesn’t mope but it’s excellent for mopping and a smile is likewise useless on tile. There’s no reason to presume that we couldn’t have emotionally dead producers, there just may be no value to anything they do. But they’re grandly productive.
Comprehensive self-awareness that we’re familiar with as humans.
In fact, turning this off is one of the first things we do, we just tend to call it “the zone” or whatever else. We’re actually much more productive without it. Nick Bostrom actually posited a world wherein this dynamic prevails in his outsourcing scenario.
Actually, the more I read over Thiel’s essay, the more I question our ideas about the future at mid century. For example:
--How many of those predictions were based on the erroneous belief that communist states were also valiantly leading the charge of progress? We now know that half the world essentially squandered five decades of human progress.
--To what extent were they underestimating the technical challenges involved?
--How many misplaced ideas about society were there? Many ideas, like interplanetary colonization, seemed to spring from a belief that people would want to play Daniel Boone in space suits.
--How much of it was driven by the now commonly understood ability of media to twist scientific findings? The world seems very different when you think that physics just created infinite energy or psychologists had just discovered how to completely unravel the mind.
And, to me, most importantly:
--What was the cost of overactive imagination? I feel like there is a lot of cynicism driven by failed futures which were wildly implausible either technically or socially. I remember that old science fiction liked to speculate about interplanetary travel and living in spaceships in the 1990s. Rotting magazines laying around the garages of grandparents seemed to present these fantasies as a fact about the near future. The sort of cynicism bred by none of this happening because none of it was really plausible could be fatal. (I for one fell into cyberpunk, so I’ve been getting a good serving of future. :P)
- 7 Oct 2011 4:13 UTC; 7 points) 's comment on Morality is not about willpower by (
Why does anyone have to know? The social cost of cryonics is determined by the spread of knowledge about your choices.
Sad fact: I am still putting off The Procrastination Equation.
I really wish that someone would develop an algorithm that stitched together news, discussion and academic papers so that a debate could be tracked. I’d especially like it if, at the end, the system would spit out “RESOLVED: XYZ is true/sorta true/a total load. [Here’s why.]”
I figure that you could currently train a machine to recognize a spin down in academic debates and hire someone who could then review the literature to write about the resolution.
I just feel the need to say this. I’m so tired of losing track of things and then never knowing whether I was right or wrong about some issue as a result.
Wouldn’t it be more likely that, since the majority of LessWrong users are from the US, most posts are US-centric because that’s what the poster himself is familiar with?
I mean, certainly we could pose a line of reasoning to create a post hoc justification for the practice, but what seems more likely is that US-centric posts are reflective of poster, not audience, knowledge. Unless you think we’d have reason to suppose that posters would readily be plucking examples, etc. from their immense knowledge of the UK or Nepal.
From the “relevant link”:
“Participants’ conformity was measured by how much they wished to conform to social expectations and be seen in a positive light, known as ‘social desirability’. They completed a standardised measure and were also asked about their attitude towards paying tax. People who score highly on social desirability are more likely to conform, for example by paying tax, and agree with others. The researchers expected that they would be more likely to co-operate as well.”
Properly, they are not measuring conformity. What they have done is asked people to signal whether they want to be identified as a “member in good standing”. This seems like an excellent way to generate an error because it also selects for people who have an incentive to be seen this way. People who are not particularly good at working with others or who lack competence will need to signal group identity more. This could explain why “conformists” appear to be worse at cooperating.
This seems like an interesting idea but it exaggerates things. First of all, I think that everyone thought that there was a large amount of overlap between research being done in the both the US and the USSR (look at the space programs for example). Second, the USSR did do a lot of very good research on their own (look for example how many Nobel and Fields medal they won as a very rough metric).
A quick and dirty estimation: the US shows 331 Nobel Prizes, France shows 58, Germany shows 102; Russia shows 27. Russia is also notably larger than either France or Germany, which it trails badly, and would have been the great majority of people in the Soviet Union.
This table of Fields medal winners shows only 3 for the USSR and 18 for the USA over the period in which the Soviet Union existed.
I think that this belief isn’t misplaced. The cost and tech issues seem to be more relevant. Being Daniel Boone in space is really expensive.
The locus here is not “being” but “playing”; “playing Daniel Boone in space” conveys the notion of an unserious, wasteful endeavor. It turns out that people are not actually all that eager to waste those resources for the “thrill of adventure” or “to be pioneers” or the like; yet much of the popular science and science fiction seems to assume this motive, possibly because it was first vigorously marketed to young males at a time when Westerns were a dominant narrative mode.
Asimov wrote an essay for the World Book Encyclopedia in which he laid out what he thought was going to happen.
Asimov was, however, a biochemist and a writer. He wasn’t an aerospace engineer or an important physicist; he certainly wasn’t someone in a position or with expertise to actually know the feasibility of what he was discussing. In most respects, he was more a member of the media than a member of the sciences; he is certainly more remembered that way, no?
- 7 Oct 2011 14:28 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Peter Thiel warns of upcoming (and current) stagnation by (
From a legal perspective, countries can claim a large exclusive economic zone. So for a seastead to fall outside the realm of government intervention would require it to be more than 200 miles offshore. This is roughly the travel distance from San Francisco to South Lake Tahoe at the border with Nevada. So unless you think that South Lake Tahoe is the perfect location with “easy access to the Bay Area” for your start-up, then Thielandia isn’t a good place to go, either.
Worse still, however, there could be no recognition of these seasteads as sovereign territory (they lack actual territory) and little incentive to change this. The “greedy government” question aside, the principle reason to reject seastead sovereignty is simply to prevent the strategic colonization of the ocean. For example, a nation could build a series of minimalist seasteads 24 nautical miles apart and claim territorial sovereignty over them and their adjacent waters. Less than 1,000 of these would be required to close the Pacific to all east-west shipping. That’s highly doable in this case but the real threats are in open-but-disputed waters like the South China Sea or strategic outlets; a chain of them which impeded shipping could create a toll opportunity for the creator even without closing a waterway.
Of course, there yet remains the problem of simply trying to evade a country’s regulations while doing business primarily, or even entirely, there. Countries take a dim view of this sort of activity and it only survives because complainant countries are unwilling to effectively retaliate against host countries. Again, lacking sovereignty, the seastead would be a legitimate target of a government force. More importantly, it would lack any significant native population and there may be few people not directly involved in this activity. This means that force against them is easier to justify and the seastead itself could easily be destroyed given that all the inhabitants can be repatriated.
To succeed, seasteading needs to be a viable alternative to landsteading. But for the reasons above, it can’t be both viable and a real alternative. The moment it becomes a real alternative, it will need to be shut down to prevent very serious problems, thus it become unviable. It can be viable, but only if it is small enough to be ignored. On a more fundamental level, I doubt many people would want to live there given the costs and distance. If anything, the seasteads would mostly become nests of shady pornographers and scamsters, precisely the people who most like to play jurisdictional games now and have the incentive to do so. This would legitimate any retaliation against a seastead, possibly with precedent from smuggling and piracy.
My answer: the success likelihood is near zero.