I think Meaningness has some interesting discussion on what “post-modernity” can mean in terms of epistemology and (scientific) thinking https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
I think he writes well (unlike OP, sorry :D) and gets to his point with relatively little text. I think his STEM-fluidity-postmodernism idea is on the more useful side, out of those I’ve seen in the whole rationality scene.
No, this is a very good comment.
New words probably shouldn’t use completely made up sounds. It can only add confusion. There may be existing similar words with completely different meaning; or worse, with distantly overlapping semantic fields.
Good existing English words were mentioned: handle, pointer. Both naturally evoke an idea to the correct direction: they point to the idea of a pointer, they provide a handle to grasp the idea of a handle.
“I didn’t intend to force my made-up words on people outside of that context, but alas, here we are” reads to me like an apology, which is proper; but wouldn’t it still be better to just not do it at all instead of apologizing afterwards? Views on this differ for sure. This type of behaviour points to a serious lack of humility.
Quick gut responses...
Crypto has not really taken off (*I wrote this section before the FTX collapse)
No one in crypto really even noticed the FTX thing. I understand it hit some EA/rat people hard, but in crypto, nah. The Terra incident in spring was way bigger; it was a stablecoin, not a run-of-the-mill gambling spree fuelled by amphetamines.
but most currency, while being mostly digital, is still unrelated to crypto
If you still equate crypto with Bitcoin, you’re… well, you’re living in 2010 or so. And one crypto year is 5 AI years, or at least was before the Transformers (in terms of tech cycles; new stuff being introduced, libraries and frameworks going obsolete).
create a new pump-and-dump scheme every couple of years
There’s serious science being done in crypto, too (e.g. ZK-STARKs wouldn’t exist in non-crypto alternate universe, not yet at least). And the cycles are not years any more than AI cycles are decades (like they maybe used to be?). I understand AI hype intersects your bubble more than the crypto hype, but I wouldn’t lightly bet which side has the stronger funding and developer mind-share right now (not that they need to be compared head-on; they’re in many ways complementary technologies, too!). Just sayin’.
I found none of those quotes in https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf
When using quotation marks, please be more explicit where the quotes are from, if anywhere.
How VWH could be extrapolated is of course relevant and interesting; wouldn’t it make sense to pick an example from the actual text?
excellent comment. Not everyone needs to push the envelope of the field they read papers on. Applications are just as important (collectively even more so!) as the foundational theory, and replication work already is the most major step/hurdle towards an application, even if it’s a toy, on a more applied field/problem.
I wouldn’t mind that kind of reading club, either :)
I’ll add a link: https://medium.com/radical-urbanist/a-million-tesla-robotaxis-would-cripple-urban-transport-f8b50223d8c2
And a quote from there: the future of urban mobility is transit, cycling, and walking, not autonomobiles driven by humans or artificial intelligence. Self-driving cars will never be a mass mobility option, and people shouldn’t be given false assurances to the contrary.
How does either robotaxi or “personal wagon” solve the mobility problem?
Add to that that the “outdated assumption” says “a single vehicle needs to do both the moving and the accommodation of the user”. Perhaps a personal car can be said to “accommodate” people, but if you only want the engine, there’s already e-scooters. The whole point of robotaxi is to reduce the number of vehicles needed by making their utilization more efficient (by sharing them). Why should we have those inefficient personal wagons lying around? Why not have houses for “accommodation” and robotaxis for “moving” the people?
...but you could put a bed in your wagon? And you could rent out your bed to massage parlors? I think this system is going to have some hygiene issues with most people...
The biggest problems with cars are traffic congestion and parking space. I assume your wagons can be stacked on top of each other? If so, the human world would essentially become a giant warehouse where trucks move human-containers from one stack to another? Doesn’t sound so much better than cities with robotaxis.
My head gets hotter and I do feel some kind of pressure around forehead for “thinking hard under pressure”, but I think it’s mostly the stress hormones and increased blood pressure / flow / heart rate.
Similar thing for looking at a monitor for many hours straight, but that too may be related to eye muscle strain.
What makes me tired is continued social interaction, especially using several languages. It’s fun but tiring. Then it’s always nice to hide in toilet or go for a walk or something, to relax and breath a bit, before continuing. That tiredness is definitely related to “thinking hard” tiredness.
EDIT: no headache. My headaches are almost exclusively due to not drinking enough water timely.
What am I missing here? 10% of 750MB is 75MB, not 7.5MB...