manifold.markets/Sinclair
Sinclair Chen
the books in lighthaven are a trap. talk to people!
It would be so cool if the ea / rat extended universe bought a castle. You’d be able to host events like this. Acquiring the real estate would actually be very cheap, castles are literally being given away for free. (though maintenance might suck idk)
btw whytham abbey doesn’t count because it’s not even a castle
is reciprocity.io still up? did it move? link seems dead. I wanted to link to it in my substack article about manifold.love
… is it still hosted out of someone’s laptop? i’d be willing to help people get it onto better infra.
I wonder if this has more to do with how taxing it is to display 100s or 1000s of elements under modern unoptimized web dev practices. In particular GitHub’s commits page used to rerender the entire page on scroll. It is easy to program things arbitrarily badly and many an engineer would prefer just displaying fewer things rather than do it the better-quality but harder way.
what’s the deal with bird flu? do you think it’s gonna blow up
this is too harsh. love is a good feeling actually. it is something that many people deeply and truly want.
it is good to create mental frameworks around common human desires which are congruent with a philosophy of truthseeking.
interesting. what if she has her memories and some abstract theory of what she is, and that theory is about as accurate as anyone else’s theory, but her experiences are not very vivid at all. she’s just going through the motions running on autopilot all the time—like when people get in a kind of trance while driving.
You are definitely right about tradeoff of my direct sensory experience vs other things my brain could be doing like calculation or imagination. I hope with practice or clever tool use I will get better at something like doing multiple modes at once, task switching faster between modes, or having a more accurate yet more compressed integrated gestalt self.
tbh, my hidden motivation for writing this is that I find it grating when people say we shouldn’t care how we treat AI because it isn’t conscious. this logic rests on the assumption that consciousness == moral value.
if tomorrow you found out that your mom has stopped experiencing the internal felt sense of “I”, would you stop loving her? would you grieve as if she were dead or comatose?
I kinda feel like I literally have more subjective experience after experiencing ego death/rebirth. I suspect that humans vary quite a lot in how often they are conscious, and to what degree. And if you believe, as I do, that consciousness is ultimately algorithmic in nature (like, in the “surfing uncertainty” predictive processing view, that it is a human-modeling thing which models itself to transmit prediction-actions) it would not be crazy for it to be a kind of mental motion which sometimes we do more or less of, and which some people lack entirely.
I don’t draw any moral conclusions about this because I don’t ethically value people or things in proportion to how conscious they are. I love the people I love, I’m certainly happy they are alive, and I would be happier for them to be more alive, but this is not why I love them.
Uh, there are minds. I think you and I both agree on this. Not really sure what the “what if no one existed” thought experiment is supposed to gesture at. I am very happy that I exist and that I experience things. I agree that if I didn’t exist then I wouldn’t care about things
I think your method double counts the utility. In the absurd case, if I care about you and you care about me, and I care about you caring about me caring about you… then two people who like each other enough have infinite value. unless the repeating sum converges. How likely is the converging sum exactly right such that a selfish person should love all humans equally? Also even if it was balanced, if two well-connected socialites in latin america break up then this would significantly change the moral calculus for millions of people!
Being real for a moment, I think my friends (degree 1) are happier if I am friends with their friends (degree 2), want us to be at least on good terms, and would be sad if I fought with them. But my friends don’t care that much how I feel about the friends of their friends (degree 3)
we completely dominate dogs. society treat them well because enough humans love dogs.
I do think that cooperation between people is the origin of religion, and its moral rulesets which create tiny little societies that can hunt stags.
I definitely think that if I was not conscious then I would not coherently want things. But that conscious minds are the only things that can truly care, does not mean that conscious minds are the only things we should terminally care about.
The close circle composition isn’t enough to justify Singerian altruism from egoist assumptions, because of the value falloff. With each degree of connection, I love the stranger less.
I didn’t use the word “ethics” in my comment, so are you making a definitional statement, to distinguish between [universal value system] and [subjective value system] or just authoritatively saying that I’m wrong?
Are you claiming moral realism? I don’t really believe that. If “ethics” is global, why should I care about “ethics”? Sorry if that sounds callous, I do actually care about the world, just trying to pin down what you mean.
Musk met with Iran ambassador. maybe the market thinks they cut a deal?
why do people equate conciousness & sentience with moral patienthood? your close circle is not more conscious or more sentient than people far away, but you care about your close circle more anyways. unless you are SBF or ghandi
you can get more of this from twitter btw
I just ran a party where everyone was required to wear earplugs. I think this did effectively cap the max size of groups at 5 people, past which people tend to split into mini conversations. People say the initial silence feels a bit odd though. I’m definitely going to try this more
I am convinced if only the Cult of Reason had not chopped off the head of Lavoisier, France woulda industrialized first. They got to clockwork and machining first! (Unless you count the antikythera mechanism of the Ancient Greeks.) Also it’s really sad how France has treated—and continues to treat—its colonies. Compared to the British they were much worse at building infrastructure and and setting up institutions. This is why no one takes French seriously. Except Japan.
lol at the guy in the video being nostalgic for the Islamic Golden Age while saying French speakers have no science. they did and they squandard it, just like Arabic speakers.
This is called “casual” when it comes to sex and relationships. Hookups are casual sex. There’s twitter gender discourse on casual cuddling. Let’s broaden the term.
Porn consumption is casual. Romance fiction consumption is casual. Parasocial idol worship is casual. Usually.
Generally all the ways you work for someone else and buy things from someone else are all casual interactions (generally asexual and aromantic as well). Almost nothing you do to survive and thrive requires trust of others. Goods and services are unconditional on your internal state and therefore you gain very little by relating to them. We call people who live fully through casual relations to be “atomized”. Marx calls this “alienation”. Not all commerce happens this way though. Like, Japanese business culture relies a lot on personal ties. You can call such activity which relies on vulnerability and faith to be “acasual trade”.