Sorry that’s what I meant to ask
maximkazhenkov
Karma: 364
At this point good faith has broken in this argument, we should stop.
You’re just delegating the problem away to an observer reputation system that has the same problem one level deeper. Who actually has incentive to align reputations of observers with what actually happened?
I can’t see any structured reasoning steps in your argument.
The damage is irreversible; once the bureaucracy take on a life of its own the incentives are aligned to drive us down this spiral of madness. Without some drastic event like the creation of AGI or world war 3, the only way I see humanity coming out of this age of stagnation is starting over on a different planet. Sure colonizing Mars is hard, but dismantling a bureaucratic nightmare without violence is impossible (I’d love to learn about any historic examples to the contrary). That’s what I believe Elon Musk really means when he says we must back up our civilization.
I think globalization is actually detrimental to progress. In a globalized world, technological innovations spread around so quickly that whoever fronts the initial investment in capital and effort will be the sucker left standing in the rain. China’s entire success story is based on this.
What incentive is there for a broad switch to proof of work?
The Bitcoin rally from Tesla’s investment didn’t last long, instead TSLA dropped like 15% over the last 3 weeks. Personally I was not thrilled with this move coming from Tesla as an investor.
But can you find the parts for a specific model of machinegun? A rocket or even guided missile launcher?
Neither of which is a meaningful challenge to state monopoly of violence. You can even legally own tanks, but these weapons are very powerful only in limited contexts. Sure you can blow up a few people with it, but an assault rifle or even a truck would do the job just as well. You’d have to go to WMDs before the situation becomes problematic.
The more fundamental problem with this argument is that, once important state secrets/WMDs have been stolen, the damage is done; the fact that someone is trying to make an extra buck off of it afterwards is rather trivial.
A hitman who isn’t definitely a cop? (I’ve never actually heard of the dark web successfully being used for this, but combined with Smart Contracts for escrow it’s at least possible ).
The problem with hiring a hitman on the web is first and foremost that there is no incentive for the hitman to follow through. There is obviously no legal recourse for the buyer, and using cryptocurrency actually disincentivizes the hitman from doing his job even more. If you’re untraceable, you’re also reputationless. I don’t see what problem is being solved by smart contracts here; at the end of the day you have to interact with the real world to enforce your contracts.
Someone who accepts crypto for their business can easily set up the system in a way that it is optional which transactions they report. Sort of how cash only businesses—or at a lower level, people paid cash tips—probably nearly all cheat to some degree on their taxes. Some of the cash can be spent on personal expenses without any records kept. Crypto makes this way easier—no longer is there large sums of cash around, it’s harder for the IRS to audit, and the same ‘benefits’ apply—someone can accept crypto for a transaction to a randomized new account they control, and sometimes they import that transaction into the books they show the government, and sometimes they don’t.
You could do the same thing with gold, yet no one bothers to do it. That’s basically my knock-down argument against crypto being revolutionary in general: there is no important aspect in which crypto differs from gold. I guess we’re not really disagreeing here; I think governments will just slap some regulations on coin exchanges and that will be end of the story, no need for more drastic measures.
The most obvious use case is as a store value; “digital gold” as Peter Thiel likes to call it. Bitcoin is limited in supply and has enough network effect behind it to succeed in the long term, other cryptocurrencies much less so regardless of any technical advantages. I don’t see crypto getting banned because A) there is too many institutional investments in it and B) it’s not a threat to Western governments any more than gold is.
Downvoted for bringing political content to Lesswrong. Even though I’m inclined to agree with lots of points mentioned in the post, it’s more important to nip bad trends in the bud. There is a dangerous tendency for social media platforms to become cesspools of political battlegrounds; I’ve witnessed it before and would prefer not to witness it again here.
If declining population growth is a cause of stagnation, how do we solve it?
Solve it? I see declining population growth as God’s greatest gift upon humanity of the century—more so than Penicillin and Haber process combined—that at least temporarily staved off a return to a Malthusian world. But if you insist on solving the issue, well, Moloch will take care of that soon enough.
With continued progress, we are not limited by land area and fossil fuels. We are not even limited to planet Earth. We are limited only by the speed of light, the Hubble expansion constant, and the heat death of the universe. If we hit those limits, I’d say humanity had a pretty good run.
That’s… not very reassuring? Anything beyond the solar system is completely irrelevant as far as exponential growth is concerned since travel time is so long expanding to the stars won’t relieve local population pressure at all. You seem to be analyzing everything in the exponential context except when it comes to resource limits.
One argument I can think of to sign up for cryonics sooner rather than later is to create social proof for your extended family. The idea of evading death by freezing yourself and awaiting future technology for a cure might be too outlandish for older people to seriously consider, and leading by example might ease that process. And while you perhaps can afford to wait for better procedures or evidence about efficacy of cryonics, your parents/grandparents probably can’t.
I think your example fails to accurately represent your actual values, even worse than the original thought experiment. Nothing in the world can be worth 1000x someone you truly care about, not even all the other people you care about combined. Human brains just can’t represent that sort emotional weight. It would have been more useful to think of your sister vs a friend of yours.
But honestly, there is no point even in substituting money for “true utility” in Newcomb’s problem, because unlike Prisoner’s dilemma, there are no altruism/virtue signaling considerations to interfere with your decision. You genuinely want the money when no ethical conundrum is involved. So maybe just put $500,000 in each box?
What really confuses me about Newcomb’s problem is why rationalists think it is important. When is the future so reliably predictable that acausal trades become important, in a universe where probability is engrained in its very fabric AND where chaotic systems are abundant?
I’ve since played at least one other Prisoner’s Dilemma game – this one for team points rather than candy – and I cooperated that time as well. In that situation, we were very explicitly groomed to feel empathy for our partner (by doing the classic ’36 questions to fall in love’ and then staring into each other’s eyes for five minutes), which I think majorly interferes with the utility calculations.
Sounds like the exercise was more about teambuilding than demonstrating Prisoner’s dilemma.
I agree with your arguments but disagree with your value judgment—why shouldn’t digital entertainment be considered progress? What’s the point of “physical progress” once people’s basic needs are satisfied (which we haven’t achieved yet)? If humanity ever becomes a Kardashev III civilization, what would we do with all that matter and energy besides creating digital Disney parks for septillions of immortal souls? What’s your vision for humanity’s future in the best case?
And that might be great for society. We don’t want people working a job primarily because it’s fun and they like their coworkers. We want them working a job because they’re providing valuable goods and services that meet pre-existing demand.
Who’s “we” and who’s “society”?
I’d be very interested in hearing arguments why this actually wouldn’t be that big of a deal.
It won’t be a big deal because smartphones was not a big deal. People still wake up, go to work, eat, sleep, sit hours in front of a screen—TV, smartphone, AR, who cares. No offense to Steve Jobs, but if the greatest technological achievement of your age is the popularization of the smartphone, exciting is about the last adjective I’d describe it with.
Speaking of Black Mirror, I find the show to be a pretty accurate representation of the current intellectual Zeitgeist (not the future it depicts; I mean the show itself) - pretentious, hollow, lame, desperate to signal profundity through social commentary.
By “bias” I didn’t mean biases in the learned model, I meant “the class of proteins whose structures can be predicted by ML algorithms at all is biased towards biomolecules”. What you’re suggesting is still within the local search paradigm, which might not be sufficient for the protein folding problem in general, any more than it is sufficient for 3-SAT in general. No sampling is dense enough if large swaths of the problem space is discontinuous.
Thank you for the response, I will definitely check out these variants. I’m trying to understand what sort of simple rules let good, deeply strategic games emerge out of them, and how inventors of such games come up with these ideas.
See that’s why I asked what’s the incentive to switch to proof of stake and not why it’s better. Like with climate change, this is a coordination problem.