OriginStamp is a Bitcoin-based service that seems to be solid.
It’s used by, for example, namespace’s Project Registration Database. (I built a custom PmWiki plug-in for this purpose, that allows any wiki page (or any wiki page you want) to automatically be OriginStamp’d upon creation. I haven’t released the code yet, but if anyone’s interested, I will.)
(I’m somewhat confused right now how much you’re speaking for yourself, and how much you’re speaking on behalf of your model of bgaesop or people like him)
The two are close enough for the present purposes.
That sort of answer is indeed appropriate, but only contingent on this notion of “a version of me who has studied cosmology, etc., for a long time, and both has opinions on certain moral quandaries and also encounters such in practice”. If we set aside this notion, then I am free to have opinions about the thought experiment right now.
Well, as far as the prevalence of my view goes, I can’t speak to that. But I do not think this is a matter of arguing definitions—rather, it’s a real difference in values. Lanrian’s comment elsethread mentions one important category of difference here.
It seems to me that figuring out the answers to questions that will, and can, only be faced by me-who-has-studied-cosmology-for-a-century (or similar), can, and should, be left to me-who-has-studied-cosmology-for-a-century to figure out. Why should I, who exist now, need to have those answers?
would you also respond the same if there were 1 million elephants buried deep underground …
Yes.
Would your answer change if there was an easily available video-feed of the elephants that you could access from the internet?
No.
I do want to note, however, that you have transitioned from “slightly different interpretations of physics” and “very nuanced facts about cosmology” to “extremely improbable counterfactual scenarios”. Those are importantly different categories of hypothetical scenario.
That aside, however:
In all but the second scenario, more than 1,000,000 million elephants do indeed “exist”
That is not the relevant consideration. From the OP:
This is why we consider it worse when a species goes from 1,000 members to 0 members than when it goes from 1,001,000 members to 1,000,000 members, for instance.
If all the elephants on Earth die, but elephants still exist in an alternate universe, it is not correct to say that “the elephant species yet survives”. Rather, the appropriate description would be “the elephant species has gone extinct; matters may, however (in this as in other things), be different in some alternate universe”.
Your 1st and 3rd scenario (i.e., the other ones where some extra-terrestrial elephants remain) similarly do not introduce any interesting facts about the elephant species.
I don’t think I understand what you mean by these two statements, taken together:
I don’t think I would pay the same in each of these scenarios
I do have a model that I “should” pay the same in each scenario
So… you do or you don’t think that it’s right to pay the same in each given case…?
That is the view the OP describes (with respect to elephants—it’s different for humans), and as I said, my own view is effectively the same, for the purpose of the current conversation.
My answers (contingent on the view OP describes, which is close enough to my own view for the sake of this discussion) would, of course, be the same in each of these scenarios. Why would they be different?
dfsdfsdfsd
Er, sorry, did you mean to post this as a reply here? I’m not quite seeing the relevance…
Your kind of usage contributes to the popularity of the social networks—the “network effects” that give them the attractiveness and power that Zvi describes. The more that people like you do what you describe, the more incentive other people have to use Facebook and Twitter, and thus the more power Facebook and Twitter have—and what they do with that power is, as we see, quite bad.
You are, indeed, endangering the commons, because you are deriving personal benefit from it, in exchange for giving power to the companies whose entire business model is building a giant pyre on which to burn that commons—and our society along with it.
The question of whether regulating social media is a good idea (and if so, how) is a tricky one, and I don’t know that I have a sufficiently informed opinion on that. But on the question of what to do individually, Zvi is entirely correct.
I do not use Facebook. I do not use Tumblr. I do not use Twitter. I do not use Instagram, Pinterest, or Snapchat.
My life is visibly better for it than that of everyone I know who does use these things.
I encourage everyone who reads this to abandon these platforms. Whatever they give you can be had elsewhere—and without paying such a terrible price.
This is an excellent post. It has that rare quality, like much of the Sequences, of the ideas it describes being utterly obvious—in retrospect. (I also appreciate the similarly Sequence-like density of hyperlinks, exploiting the not-nearly-exploited-enough-these-days power of hypertext to increase density of ideas without a concomitant increase in abstruseness.)
… which is why I find it so puzzling to see all these disagreeing comments, which seem to me to contain an unusual, and puzzling, level of reflexive contrarianness and pedanticism.
Attraction, humor, joy and love are very often irrational and arbitrary.
This is a category error. These things are not “irrational”; they’re things we value, and as such, are orthogonal to epistemic rationality (loving your child or spouse or best friend is neither “true” nor “false”) and prior to instrumental rationality (which is about how to best achieve your goals and satisfy your preferences, not about what your goals and preferences should be).
Don’t make the mistake of equating rationality with some sort of Hollywood Spock stereotype where you’re supposed to go around saying things like “this ‘love’ you speak of is most illogical, Captain”.[1]
[1] Actually, even Spock never said anything like this, but the stereotype persists nonetheless…
Edit:
then our process of determining what is “optimal” is not, and perhaps should not be simply derived from what is most rational
Given that instrumental rationality is defined as the business of determining what actions are optimal (in expectation), given your goals, this quoted part is manifestly nonsensical.
I couldn’t say. I regularly use neither the Less Wrong website (I do my LW browsing/commenting/etc. via GreaterWrong) nor Firefox (which I use only for testing purposes).
Have you reported this bug to the Less Wrong development team?
Well, they seem to have plenty of resources available to rewrite their browser in Rust, to develop a mobile operating system, to make a version of Firefox for virtual reality (!!) …
… it seems possible, at least, that some of those resources are capable of being applied to their vast backlog of bugs. But who knows?
Indeed. It’s quite frustrating, by the way; like anyone who’s been paying attention to the state of the internet lately, I really have no desire to encourage, much less contribute to, Google’s growing control of the web (and with Microsoft Edge being migrated to Google’s Blink rendering engine, Firefox will be one of the last islands of resistance to the Apple/Google—i.e., WebKit/Blink—hegemony). I want to support Firefox! I want Firefox to be good (as it once was), and I want people to use it!
But boy, Mozilla sure doesn’t make it easy…
Do frontend developers… not check whether their website works in Firefox?
Oh, we check. Of course we check.
And then we find that it doesn’t work, because Firefox has some weird bug. Some really dumb bug, that makes Firefox render a page in a different way than every other browser. Some bug that has existed for 20 years (!!!) and is still unsolved. (Or 15 years. Or 17 years. Or 9 years.)
Or Firefox doesn’t support some feature that every other browser supports. Or Firefox’s mobile simulator does not properly simulate a touch device. Or Firefox fires bizarre, superfluous events on mouse wheel scrolls. Or Firefox can’t discriminate between the left and right mouse button. Or Firefox has stopped supporting the ability to implement special CSS workarounds for Firefox. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And then what? Well, “just” fix the problem, right? “Just” put in additional development time, to compensate for the fact that Mozilla’s development process is increasingly dysfunctional? “Just” devote 500% more effort, to support… [checks notes]…
… 5% more users.
Hm.
Is Firefox so niche these days?
Yes.
I am (and any good web developer is) sympathetic to the need to support various minorities of users (by browser, by OS, by device, by physiological capabilities, by network limitations, etc.). I can tell you that I make every reasonable effort to support not only Firefox, but every browser I hear about. (I’ve responded to user complaints about lynx, links, qutebrowser, Dillo, and TenFourFox, to take several examples of varying obscurity; and in each of the cases I have in mind, I was able to solve the issue.)
But the fact is that fully supporting Firefox takes up an utterly disproportionate amount of effort. For developers who do not have the budget of a megacorporation behind them, that amount of effort cannot be justified. Many of us try. Most of us do not fully succeed. Some give up. Can you blame them?
Note that you can also set up your writing to be automatically archived via archive.is (example).