Setting a recurring alarm at 9:30pm and taking melatonin right away. Got me in the habit of getting tired and going to bed more consistently.
lsparrish
Karma: 2,718
Good points, and I think we mostly agree. If I understand correctly, the idea would rely on building a city from the ground up elsewhere rather than modifying existing cities.
In principle, pods anywhere between shipping container size and coffin size could be warehoused somewhat like cargo, although obviously more safety considerations apply, and you’d need things like supply and air conditioning lines. I wouldn’t want to put up with a small pod unless the VR experience was very good, and it was easy to get out of.
The moving company analogy is interesting because in principle, you could automate the moving process to the point where you only need to rent a space when you’re actually there. That is, a robot system picks up all your stuff, packs it and moves it to storage, etc while you’re off of work, vacation, or wherever—at which point the apartment is immediately sterilized and prepped for the next resident—and you move back in (with all your stuff in analogous places to where you left it) when you come home. Not a particularly simple task, but doesn’t need big infrastructure like moving a whole house.
With regards to RV parks, I’m thinking a metropolitan center could easily use parking garage style buildings to house the RVs indoors in tall buildings. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if these exist already in some cities. It does probably imply lower population density on a volumetric basis than an equivalent apartment complex though, as there’s going to be distance between the vehicles, thick enough floors to drive on, high ceilings for clearance, etc. On the plus side, in an RV park you can easily step out of your vehicle and say hi to the neighbors, so it’s a bit different from being palletized in an automated storage/retrieval warehouse.
I really like this kind of speculation (clearly marked as low probability, but not without effort to develop something that works in principle). I do think it’s a near-miss in terms of being an optimal path for cities though, as there are several alternatives with higher likelihood that honestly seem like they would create more value per amount of infrastructure/cost than easily-moved suburban-style homes.
First, apartments can be made better than they usually are. It’s just that usually when you move to get a job in the city, being cash constrained, you settle for the lowest budget option you can make work. The rent extracted is not lowered in accordance to the living conditions, because of the rent being extracted on the proximity to an employer.
So while it’s easy to say some people will insist on Rivendell for psychological reasons, that probably isn’t as essential as it seems. A bigger factor is that a big, high quality apartment is going to cost a very large amount. That isn’t because the physics demands a high cost for a big apartment in a high rise, but because scarcity pressures force the price upward.
Secondly, moveability correlates to smallness. So theoretically you could have e.g. a metropolis of parking garages and RVs, but a consequence of sticking to roadways as transit everyone would live in fairly small homes. At the more extreme end of small, japanese style sleeping pods, basically coffins.
As a transhumanist, I’m willing to make some trades for a better outcome. Modify my genetics to live longer, bones to be less breakable, zero gee tolerant, etc. But apart from intelligence enhancement and similar, I’d really prefer my brain and preferences not be altered much, and especially not via near term tech invented by humans. So I’d rather not self-modify to be content with coffin housing / deep crowding, and I expect this is common. And the process of getting used to it over time seems like a lot of suffering.
With good VR, it could be another story. However, an immersive VR environment in something like basically a bed in a box carries the risk of physical illness from inactivity. So you would need a gym routine or similar. It might be less safe to telework from such a thing if you’re spending the rest of your day inside of it as well. For long term use, this would probably also need to come with some kind of medical package—blood pressure check, temperature, and ways to get clean and dispose of bodily waste like with a bedridden patient. So such a device overlaps medical needs substantially.
Thus in the class of near term “what if someone Elon-like really gets a bee in their bonnet about it” questions, it seems possible that you get to a point where pods with built in equipment and easy access to amenities are better than a (much more expensive) suburban residence.
The reason pods are fascinating in spite of the technical hurdles is because they allow much higher volumetric density with (in principle!) none of the discomfort of being actually crammed into a slum. And a further benefit of VR with small box-shaped pods is that you can replace mass transit (and private cars) by shipping people in their own homes directly to the location. When they step out, assuming it’s scheduled ahead and robotically delivered at low gees, it’s sort of like being teleported.
So that’s one competing scenario with some risks, but high payoff, and it stops well short of the requirements for brains in jars or ems.
Perhaps not as likely as simply building taller apartments until the shortage goes away. However, even then, there’s the issue of coordinating and getting around building regulations. So the idea of moving somewhere empty and making a city from scratch has some appeal.
In 2011, a company called Broad Sustainable Building from China demonstrated that they could build 30 floor buildings (330 apartment capacity) in 2 weeks. The time lapse video is quite impressive. The cost was $1000/sqm or 3.3M. They’ve actually done several different buildings on similar timelines.
I’m not so sure the reason we haven’t done it here is all regulatory. Part of what they did to make it so cheap was set up a factory dedicated to the prefabricated componencts. Repeating that here in the US might push the start cost quite a bit higher. Still, it’s probably mainly regulations that prevent it, or render it a slightly more than trivial inconvenience, or whatever the blocker really is.
There was an interesting suggestion by u/jkaufman as to how one might hypothetically create location value a few years back. (For the record, I don’t agree with the critique of LVT, but I consider the article a great example of an educated near-miss that interestingly conveys foundational concepts): Land Value Taxes Are Distortionary.
Some great suggestions there IMO:
Buy cheap land in rural New Mexico.
Put down the subway tunnels before doing any construction.
Put in fiber internet, obviously.
Get big companies to sign on (ideally, before spending any money on it).
However, the real advantage really might be the lack of competing pre-existing interests in the location, rather than the pre-laid infrastructure. Here are some more examples of things centralized control/planning lets you do that a pre-existing city can’t easily do:
Define a wide radius where only buildings taller than a certain height are permitted. So no buildings need demolished to make room.
Rental agreements structured to mimic land value taxes.
Using prefab structural components like the BSB buildings?
Robot cars only. No streets for people to get killed trying to cross, not necessary to favor line of sight between buildings (put the roads in tunnels under and/or through the buildings).
Hexagonal buildings that lock side to side in a honeycomb mesh. Adds structural stability, making it (I think) possible to go higher per unit cost. More useful when you don’t need roads / roads are all in tunnels.
Mandate a set of identical building plans be used. Can be a somewhat large set to choose from, but the growth can be managed much easier if you are tiling similar things than if you have to re-plan for each tiny change on every vanity project.
So if you don’t focus on the narrow scenario, I think the OP has a heck of a lot of value. And as a general rationality point, I think it’s usually best to consider such proposals as intuition pumps for the concepts that motivate them, and figure out how to conceivably correct their deficits.
If you still want to ban politics, whatever, your actions are law, but be transparent and say what you are doing.
Is there a reason to do that? Nobody said that a rule was violated, and the explanation given makes sense to me as it stands. What is the problem with just deleting the (not necessarily rule violating) post and explaining that we usually avoid stuff like articles with Trump in the title?
Phil Metzger on building space industry arXiv
Isaac Arthur on Self Replicating Machines and Technological Singularity
Found this great youtube channel by a guy named Isaac Arthur, covering a variety of space topics. Has videos on Dyson Spheres, colonizing the Moon, and even concepts for very long term survival of civilizations and people past the heat death of the universe. Very rational and comprehensive.
My long hiatus started a couple years ago, so my perspective might be different from yours.
I think the main issue for me it was more that it wasn’t very fun any more. The people who made it fun (EY, Yvain, etc) were mostly posting elsewhere. The majority of posts were starting to be boring things like meetup announcements. Some of the new posts were interesting, but had more technical content and less humor.
Part of it could be that the commenters became more politically (in the sense of national politics) motivated, but that’s not something I noticed at the time… I think that’s perhaps a more recent thing, assuming that is indeed happening.
Another thing that might have been a factor is that I started using a smartphone more. So apps like twitter and facebook that can be easily checked there had more appeal. (This website still sucks for mobile.)
It depends on the scale you are working at. A large body with no internal heat source can be kept cold over time at a lower cost because only the outside needs to be insulated. If cryonics were at the scale of a large cryogenic warehouse, it might be much less expensive.
Orbiting landing tracks.
Payloads would be launched from earth with just enough fuel to loft them above the atmosphere and keep them hovering for a few minutes. Then they would electromagnetically couple to a long horizontal structure in low orbit, picking up velocity (or “losing” it, depending on the frame of reference) until they are orbiting at the same rate.
Electrically driven thrusters (e.g. vertical electrodynamic tethers which push against the earth’s magnetic field) would be used to replenish the lost momentum. At any given time, the payload would be a fraction of the total track mass, but since it could be new track material this would permit (fairly rapid) bootstrapping.
One possible reason is that it facilitates trust-building. Say you are stuck in a cell with another prisoner, and every day you have the chance to cooperate or defect on a small task (for example, sharing food equally vs trying to steal an unequal share). Later, you are asked to testify against each other and get a slightly reduced sentence in exchange for the other person having a drastically increased sentence. A history of the other person cooperating gives some evidence that they will cooperate in this new situation as well.
Another analogy to this would be the process of building credit. If you take out lots of loans and pay them back scrupulously, you build a history of credit worthiness. The banks are more willing to be vulnerable based on past behavior of not defaulting.
A quick process like that is pretty much insignificant compared to a month or two, let alone 15 years. Unless there are tens of thousands of other steps in the chain of comparable length, it doesn’t come close to explaining it.
As I see it, there are roughly four steps:
Excavating.
Refining.
Power collecting.
Manufacturing.
The ones towards the end seem to be the biggest time sinks. However, power collection should not raise it by more than a factor of two or so. I don’t think it takes many months to mine enough coal to pay for the energy costs of coal mining equipment, for example.
Exactly. Self-Replicating robotics on Earth is a global instant victory condition. Completion of one would result in machines that could double their production exponentially, leading to practically infinite production capability within no time.
Per Robin Hanson, a machine shop can put out its own mass in equipment in roughly a month or two. And yet, the economy doesn’t double every month, or even every year. Why not?
There seems to be a fair chance the reasons are mostly rooted in cognitive biases, cumulative coordination mistakes, economic rent-seeking, and so on—not anything technological.
A well planned lunar or orbital mission might well be free of these issues. Space conditions are mechanically simpler in some respects, so there’s a stronger case for pre-planning everything rather than requiring a market economy to make it work. Supporting structures are less needed, transit is less two dimensional, and solar energy can be harvested at scale with low costs in equipment density. There is also instant access to ultra-high vacuum conditions which are useful for refining. And in addition to the endless cheap sunlight, there’s no anti-nuclear lobby which can claim it’s in their back yard.
Suggesting self-replicating robotics is akin to saying we should just solve this whole not being post-scarcity problem.
Maybe we should solve this whole not being post-scarcity problem...
Good question. I am not sure where I originally found the idea that shorter commutes make you happier, but I suspect it might have been an earlier version of this from 80000hours, which cites a couple of studies. Googling for pre-2013 media articles shows a lot of mentions of the idea as well.
The idea about a well optimized train or bus ride that Dr_Manhattan brought up also makes sense, if you live in an area with decent public transportation. It’s the car drives that are a big time-killer, since you can’t really turn your brain off while navigating through traffic, and traffic is usually more stressful at times you need to get to work.
There are a few productive things you can do during long drives though. For example, you can practice speeches, elevator pitches, songs, comedy bits, and so on without anyone hearing. That may not be quite as effective as interacting with another person on a bus/train, but the lack of an audience/consequences can make it easier to try out new things. Also, there’s the option of consuming audio content (which you could also do with headphones on the bus or train).
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To be fair, the article got lots of things wrong.
Here’s a recent idea I had: A tattoo that responds to blood alcohol content over a certain level (e.g. causing an itchy sensation in the skin, or releasing a small amount of something that causes nausea), making it difficult / anti-habit-forming to get drunk. I’m thinking this could solve the alcoholism problem, comprehensively, without discouraging moderate drinking or relying on willpower.
Another variant would rely on social pressure. Although that is less reliable, it could be safer or easier to implement than one that creates a physiological reaction. For this version, one would have a tattoo that is usually invisible, but becomes visible in the presence of high alcohol level. It could e.g. spell “drunk” across the person’s forehead.
Of course, such an invention is not quite on par with flush toilets. Not everyone gets drunk, and it is not infectious. Alcohol is not necessary for civilization. However, comprehensively eliminating alcohol overconsumption would be pretty darned helpful and would eliminate a lot of spillover costs of alcohol consumption, like drunk driving, spousal abuse, and so forth. Moreover, ethanol in excessive doses damages the liver, heart, and skin over time.
In addition to helping people who are alcoholics or at-risk directly, a side effect of such an invention is that people who do not drink due to perceived risk of alcoholism (or reluctance to expose oneself to such a risk) would be able to start drinking. This would probably have benefits that go beyond the extra hedons. Assuming it functions as a nootropic for social characteristics, it could lead to more people being better connected socially (i.e. having more close friends).
Incidentally, I don’t see a reason something along these lines could not have been developed 50+ years ago.
If you’re trying to prevent information-theoretic death by preserving the brain it’s critical that the information that makes you be “you” actually be preserved.
Look at it from the other side: In order to achieve information-theoretic death, it is critical that the information that makes you be “you” actually be lost.
By “lost” we mean it has to be scrambled at least enough that superintelligent computronium dyson spheres aren’t going to be able to (reasonably) crack the code.
So let’s say you dissolve the brain in acid. That is likely to be a good way to achieve information-theoretic death.
Leaving it to rot for a few days? Probably.
Freezing it in ice crystals? Maybe.
Vitrifying it? Probably not.
there are many aspects of the brain structure that might or might not be relevant. Is information stored in the positions of proteins within the cells? Are phosphorylation states significant? What scale of preservation is sufficient?
Any given bit of data is likely to be stored in multiple areas by multiple mechanisms, with lots of redundancy. Moreover, every time data is stored or accessed by some mechanism, there should be side effects, things you can infer the data from that aren’t part of the mechanism. The complexity of the brain works in our favor, not against—assuming we can develop good enough reductionistic models of the brain to account for all the details.
Short for Intermediate Temperature Storage.
This is good argument capable of convincing me into pro-cryonics position, if and only if someone can follow this claim by an evidence pointing to high probability estimate that preservation and restoration will become possible during a resonable time period.
At some point, you will have to specialize in cryobiology and neuroscience (with some information science in there too) in order to process the data. I can understand wanting to see the data for yourself, but expecting everyone to process it rationally and in depth before they get on board isn’t necessarily realistic for a large movement. Brian Wowk has written a lot of good papers on the challenges and mechanisms of cryopreservation, including cryoprotectant toxicity. Definitely worth reading up on. Even if you don’t decide to be pro-cryonics, you could use a lot of the information to support something related, like cryopreservation of organs.
If it so happens, that cryopreservation fails to prevent information-theoretic death then value of your cryo-magazines filled with with corpses will amount to exactly 0$ (unless you also preserve the organs for transplants).
Until you have enough information to know, with very high confidence, that information-theoretic death has happened in the best cases, you can’t really assign it all a $0 value in advance. You could perhaps assign a lower value than the cost of the project, but you would have to have enough information to do so justifiably. Ignorance cuts both ways here, and cryonics has traditionally been presented as an exercise in decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. I don’t see a reason that logic would change if there are millions of patients under consideration. (Although it does imply more people with an interest in resolving the question one way or another, if possible.)
I don’t quite agree that the value would be zero if it failed. It would probably displace various end-of-life medical and funeral options that are net-harmful, reduce religious fundamentalism, and increase investment in reanimation-relevant science (regenerative medicine, programmable nanodevices, etc). It would be interesting to see a comprehensive analysis of the positive and negative effects of cryonics becoming more popular. More organs for transplantation could be one effect worth accounting for, since it does not seem likely that we will need our original organs for reanimation. There would certainly be more pressure towards assisted suicide, so that could be positive or negative depending how you look at it.
I recently discovered that I like peas porridge. You can apparently just put the split peas in water in an insta-pot and if you cook them enough they disintegrate. Unlike beans or potatoes, you don’t have to mash them to get a homogeneous food. The resulting soup firms up nicely when refrigerated, and you can sweeten or spice the “pudding” depending on your preference.
Winco carries dry split green peas for $0.86/lb. Walmart offers price parity to that in 8lb bags. The commodity index price is $0.15/lb, so I think something is up with the supply chain and recursive markups because that’s almost a 600% markup (contrast the allegedly typical 1-2% grocery store markup). In any case, dry peas are 20% protein, so the protein powder equivalent would be $4.30/lb. (I have yet to see protein powder at anything close to this price.)
Oats are 13% protein but slightly cheaper than peas, so they have a similar protein to dollar value ratio. They have a different amino acid profile, so you can mix or alternate between the two to get complete protein.
However, both oats and peas contain significant amounts of phytic acid which can prevent the absorption of various minerals (iron, zinc, magnesium, calcium) during the same meal. The trick here might be to cook no higher than 90°C (the lowest setting of the insta-pot should suffice) to avoid denaturing phytase enzymes prematurely while giving them time to work. Rye is relatively high in phytase, oats relatively low, so adding a handful of rye might be ideal (or wheat berries).
Alternatively, you could obtain phytase from a feed store (typically added to chicken and swine feeds). Phytases intended for animal feeds tend to be thermostable up to 120°C so you would not have to be as careful with the cooking temperature.