It’s a great approach, to avoid moral-carrying connotations unless explicitly talking about morals. I’ve been practicing it for some time, and it makes things clearer. And when explicitly talking about moral judgments, it’s good to specify the moral framework first.
A (much) harder exercise is to taboo the words like “truth”, “exist”, “real”, “fact”, and replace them with something like “accurate model”, “useful heuristic”, “commonly accepted shortcut”, etc.
You may want to read the tweets by Patrick McKenzie about his call for something similar and how it worked out: VaccinateCA.
Good choice! That’s one of the more memorable Voyager episodes.
Thank you for writing this! I’m cryostinating still, despite getting up there in years, but it looks like the doubts raised 8 years ago are still valid, so…
by all means, glad it made sense.
To distill your point to something that makes sense to me:
sensors+context->[AR Device]->stimuli->[brain]->automatic feedback to context+sensors.
Though I doubt that the AR device will be glasses, those are cumbersome and conspicuous. It could be a Scott A’s talking jewel in one’s ear (can’t find the story online now), it could be some combination of always on sensors, a bluetooth connected brick in your pocket with wireless earbuds, a dashcam-like device attached somewhere, a thin bracelet on your arm… Basically sensors processed into stimuli in whatever form that makes the most sense, plus the AR-aware devices that react to the stimuli, your brain being just one of them.
They’ll let you know where your keys are, and remind you to grab your wallet.
Well, in this particular example, keys and a wallet are redundant, the augmentations and the stimuli-aware environment will perform their function, like locking doors, identifying you to others and others to you, paying for anything you buy, etc. We are part way there already.
There are definitely practicing lawyers who are familiar with “the sequences”, not sure about the judges specifically. Whether it makes them better lawyers compared to those who are not, is not at all clear. I also suspect that there would be plenty of disagreement on which direction is a/the positive one.
The bit in the title about the Sequences? Yes.
Do we understand why cats live longer than dogs?
In a world where the AGI timelines are far in the future, how would you estimate the SpaceX impact in the next decade or two?
Yeah, a lot of those listeners were quite mechanical. It takes quite a few tries, or some luck, to find someone who is genuinely interested and engaging, but still avoids giving unwanted advice. Not sure how the situation is there now, the owner is apparently a sleaze.
In retrospect, I should not have mentioned the Sequences as an example, it’s a sensitive topic here. I personally learned a lot from them in the areas outside my expertise.
I think we are talking about different phenomena here. My point is that, if an average person trusts a source, they tend to assume that the validity of the data are the same as the validity of the source (high!) even if the source themselves takes their own data with the grain of salt, and advises others to do so. You are not an average person by any means, so your approach is different, and much better.
My personal experience with anything published is that it is 50% lie and 50% exaggeration. And yet I still rely on the news to get a picture of something I have no first-hand access to. But that’s the usual Gell-Mann amnesia. I am describing something different: forgetting to account of the source’s own uncertainty even if it is spelled out (like in the case of potential life artifacts on Venus) or easily queried or checked (e.g. for a stock tip from a trusted source: “how much did you personally invest in it based on your data?”).
That’s not relevant to the subject of the article, but, since you asked, the pattern is that if you talk to a philosopher, they point out a million holes in the philosophical aspects of the Sequences, if you talk to a mathematician, they will point to the various mathematical issues, if you talk to a statistician, they will rant about the made-up divide between Bayesian and frequentist approaches, if you talk to a physicist, they will point out the relevant errors and mischaracterizations in the parts that deal with physics. Basically, pick a subject area and talk to a few experts, and you will see it.
My main worry is whether the usual protection measures, masks and distancing, will prove inadequate against the new strain. Certainly the way the humanity has been behaving, “stay just at the limit of transmission” is favoring more contagious mutations. Or maybe it’s less variability and more transmissibility/infectivity. I wonder if there is any data on those. Probably a good idea to increase the margin of safety until we know for sure.
My initial reaction is “22 weeks is an average, but you probably don’t deal with a random sample”. If you only take on the clients that are promising enough to land a job within 10 weeks on their own (I realize that evaluating it accurately enough is a skill that can make or break a business like yours), then you basically skim free money off the top.
I don’t think this is a charitable interpretation of the prevailing views. It’s more “let’s try to avoid extinction in the hands of those smarter than us”. I don’t think “slavery” is a useful abstraction here.
I’ll just copy my comment on a Zvi’s post:
the Covid-19 mortality rate is in the Goldilocks zone for allowing (bad) choices:
If the mortality rate was 20+%, the choices of herd immunity, doing slow full-scale trials or doing nothing would not be on the table. It would be “let’s try everything, anything, now, now, now!” and the vaccines made in February would have been produced and used before summer.
If the mortality rate was within an order of magnitude of the annual flu (0.1% or so), “do nothing” would have been the only choice
As it is, 0.5%-3% mortality rate is exactly the wrong number, since the right decision is not immediately obvious to everyone. And so we have the largest number of overall deaths and the largest damage to the economy possible from anything short of Oryx & Crake-style plague.
While I don’t agree with everything, this is a top-quality comment deserving to be its own post, consider posting it as top-level?