I would use the heck out of this software if it existed, and for that reason I would very much like to assist in writing software like this.
Kingoftheinternet
Karma: 376
I’m thinking it would best be described as “cultural”. Some level of taboo against correcting others unless you’re in a socially-approved position to do so (teacher, elder, etc.) is, to my understanding, fairly common among humans, even if it’s weaker in our society and time. I brought up the common knowledge thing just because it seems to contradict the idea that a strong urge to correct others could have been particularly adaptive.
For some reason “correcting” people’s reasoning was important enough in the ancestral environment to be special-cased in motivation hardware.
It feels instinctual to you and many others alive today including myself, but I’m not sure that’s evidence enough that it was common in the ancestral environment. Isn’t “people are not supposed to disagree with each other on factual matters because anything worth knowing is common knowledge in the ancestral environment” also an ev-pysch proposition?
I think the quote’s main function is to warn those who don’t know anything about programming of a kind of person they’re likely to encounter on their journey (people who know everything and think their preferences are very right), and to give them some confidence to resist these people. It also drives home the point that people who know how to program already won’t get much out of the book. I quoted it because it addresses a common failure mode of very intelligent and skilled people.
Concretely, Milton Friedman probably didn’t have a workable plan for bringing about such an environment, though he may have thought he did; I’m not familiar enough with his thinking. One next-best option would be to try to convince other people that that’s what part of a solution to bad government would look like, which under a charitable interpretation of his motives, is what he was doing with that statement he made.
I think the spirit of the quote is that instead of counting on anyone to be a both benevolent and effective ruler, or counting on voters to recognize such things, design the political environment so that that will happen naturally, even when an office is occupied by a corrupt or ineffective person.
I went the common route of fixing the “learning advanced subjects is hard” problem by studying computer engineering in college, if that’s an option you’re able to consider. Writing simple code is a just few steps away from writing complex code, and at that point you have something you’ll likely be able to make a career out of. “Software is eating the world”, as some people accurately quip.
The software world could probably scratch your itch pretty well. Have you tried/do you like programming?
If you are reading this book and flipping out at every third sentence because you feel I’m insulting your intelligence, then I have three points of advice for you:
Stop reading my book. I didn’t write it for you. I wrote it for people who don’t already know everything.
Empty before you fill. You will have a hard time learning from someone with more knowledge if you already know everything.
Go learn Lisp. I hear people who know everything really like Lisp.
For everyone else who’s here to learn, just read everything as if I’m smiling and I have a mischievous little twinkle in my eye.
Introduction to Learn Python The Hard Way, by Zed A. Shaw
Preserving that information makes it much more likely you’ll be reproduced accurately and in a timely manner and in a situation you would be able to enjoy, rather than in twenty quintillion years because of quantum noise or some such. Part of the point of preserving your state until it can be transferred to a more durable artifact is that there’s some chain of causal events between who you were when your state was recorded, and who “you” are when that state is hopefully resumed; many people seem to value that quite a bit. You should try to avoid death regardless of your beliefs about cryonics, identity, or just about anything else.
You wrote this LessWrong post about cryonics being a good idea under the assumption that your readers would disagree with an argument from the core sequences which is usually used to support the “cryonics is a good idea” conclusion on LessWrong? To each his own.
Here are the real/hypothetical cases that mostly formed my answer to your last question:
If you were to replace every neuron in your brain with a robotic cell exactly simulating its function, one neuron at a time and timed such that your cognition is totally unaffected during the process, would this cause you any doubts about your identity?
Why doesn’t the interruption in your conscious experience caused by going to sleep make you think you’re “a different person” in any sense once you wake up, keeping in mind that a continuous identity couldn’t possibly have anything to do with being made of the same stuff? What about when people are rendered temporarily unconscious by physical trauma, drugs, or other things that the brain don’t have as much control over as sleeping?
″...Cryonics in some way preserves the original material, but your Speedy-dupe vaporizes it. The copy which emerges ten years later is not a direct continuation of the original physical material.”
I would guess that many people here disagree with that assessment.
If the pattern is recreated precisely (or even well enough) at a temporal or spacial distance from the original, what is actually different between Speedy-dupe and Cryonics?
Not much. Both are processes that send a snapshot of the physical implementation of all the algorithms that are collectively called a person/”soul” through time or space.
1) Almost zero, of course. How should that affect our interpretation of that fact?
I don’t understand what you mean by the second question.
That could definitely apply to a lot of the examples they presented. I’m still mystified by Washington D.C.: they already had a higher murder rate than the US average, then handguns were banned in 1975, then their murder rate tripled while the national average stayed fairly flat, then their murder rate came back down to its mid-70s level in the late 2000s, then the handgun ban was struck down. My current favored conclusion from that is “gun control laws themselves just don’t matter very much, and are dwarfed by other social and cultural forces.”
They explain how they found that number here. I’m pretty impressed with their methodology, though I’m also sure you have a point about people exaggerating their chances of dying regardless of what clever study authors do.
My strategy in these cases is usually “look for lots of facts relevant to this issue and see what stands out”. The things that jump out at me from just that page:
Many American cities/states (and the entire UK in one very interesting case) have instituted or repealed gun control laws long enough ago that we can look at what happens to violent crime before and after the law is changed. In every case that they showed me, at least, places that pass gun control laws see an increase or no real change in their violent crime rate relative to national average.
1⁄3 of incarcerated US felons claimed to have been shot at, scared off, wounded, or captured by an armed victim, but only 1⁄12 of violent crimes committed in the US ever result in a prison sentence. My interpretation of these two numbers combined is that owning a gun makes it more likely that anyone who tries to commit a violent crime against you will not be successful, and also will more likely be punished by prison time and/or being shot.
Just 8% of violent crimes are committed by someone visibly armed with a gun.
About 11,000 murders per year are committed by gun in the US (in 2008), and about 160,000 people (in 1993) claim they’ve used a gun for self-defense in a situation within the last five years where someone would have died had they not had a gun. Based on these two numbers alone, and probably not exercising as much care as I should in producing such a pithy and easily-repeatable factoid, widely available guns (in the context of American society in the recent past) prevent on the order of three deaths for every one they cause.
The relative lack of facts that would justify stronger gun control laws on that site makes me suspicious, but I don’t see anything wrong with the cited sources for any of these specific numbers.
this partiular sequence of events seems to me highly implausible from a naturalistic perspective
You’ve noticed that too?
1 Kings 7:23