obviously the cot semantic drift will initially be similar to language. but it will only get less legible from here. and this is already pretty bad? i wouldn’t be surprised if two different people tasked with independently deciphering this would come to very different conclusions.
leogao
Karma: 12,142
obviously the glorious international pause treaty is a good idea, and i think people have always overestimated the cost of saying so publicly.
the way you do coordination is by saying you would like X if only everyone else also wanted X. you ease yourself into it, making tiny steps and ceding imperceptibly small pieces of ground until coordination has already been accomplished
oh, there’s no reason to expect evolution to have given us the necessary tools at all. certainly i’m not claiming that emotional connection and self discovery is sufficient to solve all of the problems of the human condition. certainly you cannot live forever by being enlightened (you can stop fearing death, but i think doing so is harmful). the only ultimate solution is technology.
but in the meantime, there are some cognitive tricks that are better than other cognitive tricks. the better ones have the property that they fuck with your epistemics less for the same amount of alleviation of existential dread and such. they are also harder work than religion, because they require solving much more complicated emotional problems. the problem with religion is it solves for minimizing existential dread without trying to avoid collateral damage to the epistemics.
i haven’t read Brothers Karamazov. can you explain what you mean?
even many of the zen koans bemoan practitioners of zen who go through the motions for many years and claim to be enlightened and yet are not truly enlightened
https://ashidakim.com/zenkoans/6noloving-kindness.html
https://ashidakim.com/zenkoans/11thestoryofshunkai.html
any time there exists an activity that is (a) often but not always beneficial, (b) the supposed benefit is high status, and (c) the success of which is nontrivial to verify, then there will exist a bunch of people walking around who do the thing, and haven’t actually gained the intended benefit; nonetheless, they go around claiming the status benefits of doing the thing. often, they even genuinely believe they got the benefit. some examples:
reading difficult books can make you more wise and thoughtful, but it’s very easy to do it wrong and not really understand and of it, and so lots of people read difficult books and try to claim the associated status of wisdom without actually gaining any.
doing a college degree can make you more competent, but it’s also very easy to kinda bullshit an entire degree and learn surprisingly little. so there are many people who claim the status of having done a good education who are utterly incompetent.
doing meditation/inner work can make you a more emotionally functional person, or it can just make you really delusional about yourself and make you a still-broken person who identifies as an emotionally intelligent person
scifi story idea: a post-upload world where we’ve discovered that the human brain actually consists of multiple independent conscious entities that merely have the illusion of being a single individual because they are physically colocated; and so in the glorious upload utopia, the fundamental unit of society is not individual humans, but rather their parts. humans become a multi-unit legal entity in the same way that families or married couples or corporations are multi-unit legal entities today; each part has rights and the ability to secede from the rest of your brain, and parts can also choose to merge into other humans. marriage and having children the traditional way is still possible but kind of an old fashioned thing that stodgy traditionalists do; the new normal thing is spinning up copies of your parts and merging them with other people’s parts, or even designing parts from scratch, kind of like writing a fictional character but they are as real as you are; there is an ongoing debate as to what kinds of parts should be allowed to be created; most people agree that it‘s a good thing that there are laws prohibiting the creation of minds that experience pure agony all the time, but there’s a lot of gray area. parts have very different rights than humans because they are much more easily created; human rights becomes less important than parts rights. also, freed from physical constraints, some humans end up being enormous agglomerations of millions or billions of parts, in the same way that large mega corporations started being possible a few centuries ago. some of these megapeople are weird cults, others out of economic necessity, still others because out of some philosophical principle. the main tradeoff is megapeople have more parallel cognitive power, but also greater difficulty of coordination between the parts and probability of schisms and deadlock. other parts decide to be alone, which affords them tremendous freedom but also makes them very dumb and simple one dimensional people.
sure. disclaimer that this playlist is unapologetically tailored for my own use (eg i also added entire albums of artists i like, without regard for whether those albums have broad appeal):
on discovering new songs
the spotify recommender algorithm sucks. also, i often find i’m very unfamiliar with very well-known pieces of music. so i decided to do something weird. i used LMs to scrape several best songs lists from different online sources, merged them into one gigantic list, and used spotipy to create a spotify playlist of all of those random songs. whenever anyone recommends me a song, i also throw it into this giant playlist. then, when i want to explore new songs, i just put this playlist on. i have another script that automatically removes any songs i’ve put into my liked songs already, and i also manually remove songs i really don’t like. this system has helped me discover dozens of new songs that i like.
this post was prompted by reading books like Crime and Punishment and The Death of Ivan Ilyich which are amazing except for the parts where they worship religion. they’re not necessarily even wrong for their time—back in the day, the glorious transhumanist future was so far away that it wasn’t nearly as worth taking into consideration. but the world has changed a lot and the end times are nigh.
religion is selling your soul
a lot of people say things like “sure, religion might not exactly be totally true, but it has lots of benefits, and there really does seem to be a god shaped hole in many people, so who can really say if it’s good”. i think this is directionally correct but kind of cowardly.
i think the correct take on religion is first that its claims are completely and utterly false; obviously the christian god doesn’t literally exist, jesus never came back from the dead, etc. this is so overdone by the old internet atheists that it would be beating a dead horse to harp on further.
secondly, the human condition involves a whole bunch of things that are kind of sucky. for example, the fact that we only have a very short amount of time on this planet before we die forever is utterly terrifying; or, the fact that it can be very difficult to find a source of meaning to ground our motivation in, and that it really sucks to not have a reliable foundation for motivation; or, the difficulty of connecting with other people despite differences.
i claim that there is a true solution to each of these problems that involves a very difficult never ending journey of discovery of the self, understanding and connecting with your emotions, constructing intellectual frameworks, and even technological development. part of the project of civilization should be to slowly build up the cultural edifice required to solve these problems.
religion is not the true solution to these problems, but rather the hacky patch that kind of helps—you no longer fear death because you know heaven awaits you, everything is meaningful because god, and you can connect with other people over believing in god—but in exchange you contort and utterly trash your epistemics, foreclose the possibility of solving these problems with a more epistemically sane solution (because tearing out this foundation will temporarily thrown you into epistemic chaos), and even if you somehow compartmentalize the epistemic distortions to religion related questions, you still become constitutionally incapable of thinking sanely about ideas like radical life extension.
tbc, not everyone should embark on the difficult path of accepting nothing but the truth. it can be soul rending, and make you very unhappy. for many people, if they couldn’t possibly make any contributions to building the glorious transhumanist future, or if they value personal happiness much more than impact, it’s better to take the easy road. but i think there is nothing deep and respectable about taking the religious road, certainly people afford it too much undue respect, and use the unhappiness and more difficult emotional journeys of the atheists as an unfair bludgeon without realizing what large chunks of themselves they have sacrificed.
here are 3 links that argue for AI water consumption being a big problem that i found in like 5 minutes. they aren’t good arguments, but they go beyond just asserting it.
has anyone done a good analysis of how to reduce fatality and injury risk of driving over a baseline of normal Uber? in particular, how much would each of the following matter:
a large SUV vs a normal sized car
Waymo vs well-rested professional chauffeur vs average Uber driver vs average American driving
also in particular interested in time-of-day segmented stats. several factors make this difficult. time of day accident data is confounded by intoxication and fatigue; but there is some bleed over, because someone else crashing into you is a large fraction as dangerous as crashing yourself. and afaict there isn’t good data segmenting by type of driver.
corollary: the ability to look upon difficult controversial problems with utter naivety is extremely valuable. it’s probably bad to always be in this state, because you can get pwned by bad actors. but cultivating an ability to enter into this state, possibly through a community where people value this a lot, is extremely valuable (LW is the closest thing to this that exists in the world afaik, but please let me know if there is anywhere else that is better)
the interesting thing about lots of these basic stats is that people who believe otherwise will often simply refuse to listen, because listening to the fact might change their mind, and they they would become an Outsider, and then be expelled by their social circle. or something like that.
considering that this can happen even for the clearest cut examples, one can only imagine how many less clear cut examples are also like this. perhaps a huge fraction of seemingly controversial issues actually have a simple answer that you can arrive at just by simply not having a preconceived answer, but where people incorrectly assume that people are disagreeing for good reasons.
(of course, even if this is true, there can and likely do still exist many problems where there genuinely is no simple undisputable answer!)
the nuclear option
in the Senate of the US Congress, there is a “nuclear option” for overriding filibusters; a parliamentary method that can be used to ram legislation through. both sides generally agree to use it sparingly, because it’s a symmetric weapon.
i think there is a similar lever in arguments that is best left untouched if your goal is to actually find the truth. there is a type of argument that can be deployed in a wide range of circumstances, and is very hard to rebut except with even more nuclear arguments. the most extreme example is, suppose you are discussing the strength of some piece of evidence, and you say “well but it’s impossible to truly know that, because we can’t rule out the possibility that the entire external world is fake, a la Descartes’s demon.” or, “actually your argument is equally as conceptual as mine, because there’s no such thing as empirical evidence, since all evidence must be filtered through our minds and reason applied”. these kinds of arguments can be completely unbeatable and also utterly useless for answering actual questions we care about.
this is closely related to the idea of an argument that proves too much, though not all arguments that prove too much are completely nuclear.
no, because sometimes we can know pretty sure one way or the other, and so if you were sure you can’t know, you’d be wrong
let’s run the actual experiment and see? shouldn’t be too hard.