Are you very interested in making more paperclips, Mr Tyler? Or should I say, Mr Tiler?
sfb
Karma: 438
A premature really powerful Optimization Process is the root of all future evil.
I don’t think it’s worth a quick read as she doesn’t discuss the arguments, just trots them out, but let me try for some karma with a summary:
Science wants to reverse ageing but that has drawbacks says Joan Bakewell.
Ageing process reversed in elderly mice, but no reason for excitement.
Anti-aging for looking young deludes people, bodies age, get used to it.
Years ago people were crippled by disease, this is the proper field for what medicine should do.
Cryogenicists are ‘frantic’ for eternal life, but the world might be different, and why bother trying if revival is uncertain? Who would revive damp and out of date people to add to population problems? Some deluded people get only heads frozen—creepy.
Most don’t want immortality but living longer is good, but also planet should stay same which gives a resources problem. We can’t eat sand, science proposes flights to Mars.
We must consider benefits of anti aging against costs even though it’s distasteful to calculate like that, but China’s one child family rules do that.
Author is too old to benefit from anti-ageing future, but isn’t worried.
Benefits of current longevity: grandchildren marrying, lifestyle pleasures.
Negatives: isolation, lack of employment, rejected by mainstream, indifferent/distant family, inept carers, entropy.
Life is about family, friends, memories; the young are too busy and dismiss these so we old people have to set patterns for their old age.
Suggested edits for an audience made of stereotypical LessWrongniks:
It’s business as usual for a bartender, and one day as he is cleaning his bar an unusual customer walks in dressed in an expensive suit, a beautiful supermodel hanging off each arm and with a limo parked outside. Furthermore, the man has an orange for a head.
The bartender assigns high probability that the man is dressed in a costume of some sort, pretty low probability that he is hallucinating given that nothing else appears odd, low to medium probability that the talking orange-lookalike is a robot creation with a radio link to a real person elsewhere, and negligible probability that his whole understanding of the universe is wrong to the level that genies, magic and talking conscious fruit with biological connections to a human nervous system exists.
He greets the man and serves him a drink.
Alternate middle: “For my first wish I asked for an unlimited fortune. The genie became very quiet and after a minute or two, coins started appearing beside it. Then more and more, I saw the ground, the grass, rocks, all start morphing into coins more and more of them. I pocketed some and ran.
He looks around. “I hope it’s not still going”, he said with nervous laughter.
“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.” -Oscar Wilde
And here I was thinking it was obscure mathematical gibberish that would discourage non-nerdy people from participating. Instead it’s mentioning an idea by a famous author that’s scaring them off.
;-)
It also allows us to anticipate ill consequences which don’t happen, and suffer them in advance. Sometimes repeatedly.
(And by “allows us to”, I also mean “it often does so automatically”).
Never having been born means one can’t benefit from one’s life,
This seems as much a mis-answer as the saying “someone lost their life”, as if the someone and the life are separable.
“One can’t benefit from one’s life if one isn’t born” implies that one exists before one is born—that there is a “person” (a specific person) hanging around somewhere real, waiting to be born. This is not the case. A child is born and it’s neural patterns arrange themselves into a person.
Before a child is born, there is no real extant thing, anywhere, posessing the attribute “lack-of-benefitting-from-it’s-possible-future-life”.
(Similarly, you cannot ask what it would be like if you were born in another country, or born in 1750, or born to a wealthier family, because that style of question makes the same mistake of getting the order of the wrong way around).
There isn’t any X to satisfy the sentence “X is not being born”, so “not being born” isn’t evil. [Edit: I suppose, unless you class miscarriages or abortions, but I think the point still holds because that still carries the same misconception of a whole “you” within the unborn cell cluster somewhere].
CronoDAS’s Brother’s Co-worker tried to sabotage CronoDAS’s Brother’s work.
“To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune… to lose both seems like carelessness.”—Oscar Wilde (though he didn’t mean it to refer to cryonics).
[Edit: correction, thanks ciphergoth]
(UK Specific post, not a car person).
tl;dr Find one, optionally pay a company to check it isn’t stolen or legally written off, and has no outstanding finance. Agree an amount of money. Sign the vehicle ownership documents, trade those and the car for the money within any applicable laws governing trade in your area. If your car has the required tax and safety certificates, and you have the required license and insurance, drive away, otherwise sort those out next. Cross your fingers and hope it isn’t a lemon, but realise that if it is, it is a setback, not the end of the world.
end tl;dr
You decide what you are looking for and/or what you can afford, and search around for ones within your area or however far you are willing to travel. If you are searching yourself then you will look at vehicles on the street with “for sale” signs on them, in local newspapers and advertising boards, on local search sites, or national ones such as Craigslist, Ebay or Autotrader, or at dealers/garages or their websites.
If you are searching with a dealership, you can discuss you requirements with them and they can suggest available cars, possibly distant ones in other garages in their group which they can transport to you. Many official dealerships for car manufacturers run approved used car schemes where they take recent cars (typically 3 years old), service them and then offer better than normal guarantees / warranty extensions, for an extra cost.
When you find one you are interested in, make contact with the seller and arrange to look at the car before buying. It would help here if you know someone you can take along, not just for a second set of eyes looking at the car, but also for a defence against pushy sellers or a second set of eyes checking your behaviour isn’t too biased towards/against purchasing. Have a look around in advance in price guides and listings so you know expected prices for that make, model, specification and age. Find a checklist from somewhere online and look for things to check when inspecting a used car, to take with you. You primarily want to make sure it:
Is what you were expecting and will do what you want or need.
Has not been crashed seriously.
Has been basically looked after (serviced regularly).
Has not been rebranded as a higher model, had any low quality modifications such as nonstandard wheels or engine enhancements which might be dangerous, or indicate the owner drove it hard (and thus wore parts surprisingly heavily), or did crummy repair work which might not last.
Doesn’t surprise you—find out what works and what doesn’t.
I don’t think they are under any obligation to give you a test drive, and if you do want one you will need to have the usual driving license and insurance cover to do so. I don’t know what you are looking for on a test drive beyond a general “does anything feel, look, sound or act wrong or suspicious” and “is it ergonomically OK”.
Before buying, you ought to get a vehicle background check (at a cost) to confirm it isn’t stolen, written off, financed with money owing, etc., and you may want to pay a mechanic service to give it an inspection. In the UK, The AA can do both—other companies can too.
(Again UK specific) cars more than 3 years old need MOT certificates (meets basic safety requirements) annually, so make sure the car has one or will have by the time you get it. It will need a tax disc (again, annual) before you can drive it, so if it has one in-date that is good. During the trade you will need to complete a form on the vehicle papers which the seller signs to say they are no longer the owner, and you sign to say you are the new owner, and the seller needs to send it to the DVLA to officially make the car no longer their responsibility.
Optional extra: haggling. You may wish to for the sake of saving money, but you don’t have to (notice the societal disapproval of people who pay the asking price). Offer them less, or if buying from a dealer, convince them to give you more into the deal such as a tank of fuel, a free service, etc).
More specific advice: http://www.theaa.com/motoring_advice/buying-advice.html
“Please don’t hold anything back, and give me the facts” – Wen Jiabao, Chinese Premier (when meeting disgruntled people at the central complaints offices).
“The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year.
Unless you give at least forty-five minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your ninety minutes of a night are chiefly wasted. This means that your pace will be slow.
Never mind. ”—Arnold Bennett, How to Live on 24 hours per day.
When programmers code faulty software then it usually fails to do its job.
It often does it’s job, but only in perfect conditions, or only once per restart, or with unwanted side effects, or while taking too long or too many resources or requiring too many permissions, or not keeping track that it isn’t doing anything except it’s job.
Buffer overflows for instance, are one of the bigger security failure causes, and are only possible because the software works well enough to be put into production while still having the fault present.
In fact, all production software that we see which has faults (a lot) works well enough to be put into production with those faults.
What you are suggesting is that humans succeed at creating the seed for an artificial intelligence with the incentive necessary to correct its own errors.
I think he’s suggesting that humans will think we have succeeded at that, while not actually doing so (rigorously and without room for error).
I guess for the topic of this forum, I should ask whether you were objectively looking for forum attitudes either way, or whether you set out to seek negativity and, with confirmation bias, found it?
Alternately, Western ‘word salad’ Philosophy might benefit from a bit of reinventing:
http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy’s claims. It’s supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.
Because philosophy’s flaws turned away the sort of people who might have corrected them, they tended to be self-perpetuating. Bertrand Russell wrote in a letter in 1912:
Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject.
[..] There’s a market for writing that sounds impressive and can’t be disproven.
PJ, I’d love to drag you off topic slightly and ask you about this:
before I understood the reasoning myself, I thought the entire thing was a cult of personality, and wondered why everybody was making such a religious-sounding fuss over a minor bit of mathematics used for spam filtering. ;-)
What is it that you now understand, that you didn’t before?
I never read it. I understand there were pigs involved.
I guess you are referring to Newspeak, which is in “1984” whereas pigs are in “Animal Farm”. If you wish to read either, (George) Orwell’s writings and books are available online for free (I don’t know what the copyright situation is) here:
it is important to know which parts of the world are at war, when earthquakes and floods happen, At least, so that you can be aware if something puts people you know at risk, and so that you don’t look too foolish around the water cooler.
I have rarely found any of these things of any great use, apart from flooding around where I live—that covers 50-100,000 people whereas the mainstream news covers flooding everywhere on the globe—much more information than matters to me.
And as for looking foolish … that’s not a great reason for doing something if you consider it a waste of time.
What if something really important happened?
Well? What if it did? Something really important happened and you missed it … is that so bad?
The curse of visible intent. Those afflicted by this find their innermost secrets such as fear, surprise, eagerness, alarm, desire, all show up in consistent facial muscle changes for all the world to read, a betrayal by their own flesh.
St Addahad’s Symptoms. A small group of symptoms including fleshy growths, nerve clusters and neural pathways which result in a near permanent state of distraction as patterns of air pressure change are translated into thoughts and inserted into the mind with disruptively high priority. “Sounds” from all around, indoors and out, near and far, from nearby footsteps to distant thunderstorms or even one’s own bodily functions all combine to make a state of prolonged focus nearly impossible to achieve, though this ability can be regained somewhat with practise.
As with many curses, St Addahad’s sufferers describe benefits as well, such as being able to know things are happening without needing to see them, and to know which direction they are happening in, and some even report being able to balance without handholds. These trivial sounding benefits appear so addictive that most refuse to be treated. Efforts are underway to cause the onset of these symptoms by technological means, but there is debate on the moral issue of such experiments on humans as the necessary interventions cannot wait until the age of consent.
The Ultimate Affliction Unimaginable torment and suffering by subtle and cruel methods. A mind’s model of the universe is realigned so it perceives through the flaws in itself, and senses an ability to change the world however it pleases, where no such ability can exist. The state of the world is observed, interpreted into ‘events’, and compared against imaginary desired states, and with each mismatch comes suffering, every moment bringing another opportunity to suffer. Taunted by confirmation bias, such a mind can be driven insane when the outcomes it desired and the outcomes it observed match on some occasions; believing that this is proof that it’s delusion is real and if only it was better, stronger, cleverer, it could turn these incidents into a continual happening, only to keep discovering that Fate has a different plan.
Habituated into assigning labels to areas of concept space, each area is meta-tagged with “good” or “bad”, and this is the subtle yet effective twist by which the mind is turned against the very reality in which it inhabits, and by the mystical wonders of self-reflection begins to generate it’s own suffering. No other known suffering is so simply induced, so long lasting, so wide ranging and so difficult to temporarily calm completely.
Happily this most horrifying of all known curses has both a near term cure from a reworking of though processes to dismiss the “desired outcomes”, though this can be very hard to induce; and apparently a far term cure, as our universe is trending towards states that many of these minds desire it to have. We theorise that as the universe and the desires match more and more closely, suffering will be correspondingly reduced.