Humans are physical beings. Even if humans were transferred into digital beings there would still remain the equivalent of passing on the bare minimum of electricity in order to more perfectly satisfy some cognitive ritual. Totally disregarding your infrastructure would only be an option to an agent with no physical parts. But those agents can’t do actions. And that includes attempts to try to satisfy any rituals.
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Karma: 1,681
I am going to turn from a lurker to do the manual version of this.
I am not sure I am subcultured enough to align my votes with the consensus. Doing it this way can elict more explicit reasoning of why posts get voted the way they do. Of course doing this will automatically make the comment meta-discussion. I plan to do very short, word or phrase like motivations for both why the post was worthwile and why it wasn’t.
I won’t read all threads and I am not doing a public service (so don’t count on me doing this). I am thinking of leaving a comment on every thread start post that I read and always voting either up or down. For discussion in comments I will think I will have a heuristic of judging long and critical (at sole my intuitive criterion) posts. Long posts drain more attention so they better use it productively. Non-throwaway posts are more in need of feedback and dialog.
I think that reasons for up and downvote are quite distinct few per person voting. Having that information plainly in view would take a lot of implicit misunderstanding away. Off-course there are risks in more subtle and harder to pronounce feedback being trampled. Not everyone wants to be crockered.
Anyone have more reservations that I could be aware of beforehand? Know that I am open to discussion regarding this behaviour.
Voted up for a clear situation in compact description.
Pro Up: on-topic on AI, compact, clear, open vulnerability, real confusion Pro Down: Unrealistic Omega situation, forgetting as method of reset seem off point
Downvoted for roundaboutness
Pros for Up: Spreading rationality, positive news on progress Pros for Down: conflictory use of strenght buildup and bypass, low focus on the title issue, post category confusion (is this an advert, news report, job offering or methodology query?), low topic cohesion: transhumanisms is a tack on
Downvoted for low payback meta-discussion
Pros for Up: Making rationality accessible, involves action
Pros for Down: No new rationality contribution, organising rather than executing work
Downvoted for low significance problem in a low significance text
Pros for Up: Lenghted appropriately short, recognising confusion, news on progress
Pros for Down: Open thread -type of post as discussion article, very tiny details in very peripheral materials
Upvoted for clear setting of a line of reasoning
Pros for Down: Vague logic jump based on surface phenomena, organising rather than executing work
Pros for Up: Acknowledging ignorance, clear explicitation and individualization of stance
I would appriciate that downvoters of my downvote clarify whether they have issue with any of the listed motivations, the final vote direction or making these kinds of judgement comments
Voted Up for precision disagreement.
Pros for Down: Claiming error on chain of reasoning without pointing the flawed link, treating a sequence as community manifesto instead of Elizers stance
Pros for Up: Topic that allows education of audience (QM), focused and individualized disagreement. introducing of a subfield of theory, voiced dissent
As many of the comments have pointed out the point raised is not the only viewpoint. Running with the new situation from different angles could have produced fruitful thought that could have been applied with the post.
Cryonics has details worked out while the hydronics hasn’t. Thus it’s somewhat likely that you are comparing the weak points of cryonics to good points of dryonics. Hunting for a better method it’s all good but it can make the comparison accidentally better than it would be after a closer investigation. The cryonics side of the comparison is fixed while the new method side works with just what is apparent.
Say that I think of methods to move in space beside rockets. I might think of dropping behind nuclear bombs to improve energy extracted per mass used. This might be all nice while only thinking about pushing a craft forward. However if I stop to think about other implications the situation doesn’t seem too rosey: there might be radioactive products left behind, there can be significant forces to nearby other vessels or habitats, it would be trivial to weaponize. These disadvantages might be overcome with some design but it’s far from “go faster” kind of magic button. And I don’t need high technical abilitity to realise that those sorts of drawbacks are possible.
With dryonics it likely needs some support from cell chemistry. Changing the cell chemistry on a already alive human could be somewhat messy. And even if it would be adjustable it is somewhat likely that human cells do interesting things that conflict with such “design constraints”. How much immune system efficiency, alcohol tolerance or metabolism speed would be ok price to pay for the advantage? Even if successfully dried people would require less energy upkeep protecting them from erosion might bring the cost closer to high tech upkeep. At room temperature the surrounding bacteria can be active. Would they be vulnerable to winds, sounds or earthquakes?
If we only want methods that work in principle regardless of details you can always plan for a round trip in the stars to use the twin paradox to be subject to the expertise of future doctors. The question is only whether the details of time dilation, cryonics or dryonics are doable. Thus skipping or being ignorant of the details doesn’t help that much. Finding a new preservation mechanism mainly extends the frontier where concrete progress can be made. So eventually before long you have to dig deeper. And doing today what you could do tomorrow ensures you don’t get stuck in the past.
Making small firm steps at a time is easily supported. Taking only a single step for not knowing how to take more is very probably underapplying ones knowledge. If the reasoning can go on with basically a empty reply from another party it’s likely thought was suppressed very early. If one strives to take things to their logical conclusion this is a bad thing.
If it’s not clear do understand that the post was supportable. I could just convince of ways it could have been awesomer. I could have communicated better what kinds of more sharper thinking could have happened in writing this post or atleast not detract attention (needlessly lenghten) with on topic content from the thinking options available. Instead of just settling for the first step one could say to one say : “I need to go deeper” que inception music. And you propably want to do that in the first place instead of waiting around for a demanding reason to do it.
I have just recently starting to vote what I read and explicitly state my reason for that decision. Not all people want to have every detail rubbed against their face. When asked I can elaborate. I might not be adept enough in rationality foruming to offer a detailed analysis of what went wrong or help what can be done that such shortcomings don’t happen in the future. Because of known tendency that people don’t tend to cast themselfs as villains in their story, for precaution, I will also mention that this is likely to be a newbie-newbie interaction as discussed on the “eternal september” threads.
But I do vote and say why I vote and I hope that that is more valuable than my explanations being misleading/confusing is detrimental. I don’t know, I am experimenting whether it works. I could easily be that the long explanation is just noise with the signal being in those word or phrase like descriptions.
I can concieve ways that those two statements can be held semi-coherently.
It can be construed as conflict between autonomy and outside determinism. That is whether electrons have internal mechanisms or laws of physics or whether all those are only the expression of the it’s environment (think nature vs nurture).
The issue can also be whether happenings are deliberate or not. The decision making process is part of the great physical machine so there is causal interaction with the decision and most atoms.
Also describing laws of physics determining the qualities of something mental works too. But then mental is defined so strictly that it won’t allow the usual loose smuggling of arbitrary behaviours. But being deterministic doesn’t neccesarily imply what is the underlying metaphysics.
Just because words have meanings one can’t assume that others have the “correct” or “conventional” meanings. Similar kinds of levers might connect to very different machinery. It seems like the discussion might have been more about both trying to convince the other of their own view. With being dilligent on whether your own beliefs on the meanings of words match that of the other side would make you better understand what caused the apparent contradiction. Cursing the inadequateness of others is not so productive a reaction, figuring out why expectations where not met usually provides knowledge.
Don’t really know if you have my sympathy more than the other side.
Atleast in surreal numbers you could have infinidesimal chance of getting a (first order) infinite life span and have it able to win or lose against finite chance of finite life. In the transition to hyperreal analysis I expect that the improved accuracy of vanishingly small chances from arbitrary small reals to actually infinidesimal values would happen at the same time as the rewards go from arbitrary large values to actual infinite amounts.
Half of any first order infinidesimal chance could have some first order infinite reward that would make it beat some finite chance of finite reward. However if we have a second order infinidesimal chance of only a first order infinite reward then it loses to any finite expected utility. Not only do you have to attend whether the chance is infinite but how infinite.
There is a difference between an infinite amount and “grows without bound”. If I mark the first order infinite with w: there is no trouble saying that a result of w+2 wins over w. Thus if the function does have a peak then it doesn’t matter how high it is whether it is w times w or w to the power of w. In order to break things you would either have to have a scenario where god offers an unspesifiedly infinidesimal chance of equal infinite heaven time or have god offer the deal unspesifiedly many times. “a lot” isn’t a number between 0 and 1 and thus not a propability. Similarly having an “unbounded amount” isn’t a spesified amount and thus not a number.
The absurdity of the situation is it being ildefined or containing other contradictiction than infinities. For if god promises me (some possibly infinite amount) of days in heaven and I never receive them then god didn’t make good on his promise. So despite gods abilities I am in the position to make him break his promise or I know beforehand that he can’t deliver the goods. If you measure on “earned days on heaven” then only the one that continually accepts wins. If you measure days spent in heaven then only actually spending them counts and having them earned doesn’t yet generate direct points. Whether or not an earned day indirectly means days spent is depenent on the ability to cash in and that is dependent on my choice. The situation doesn’t have probabilities spesified in absense of the strategy used. Therefore any agent that tries to calculate the “right odds” from the description of the problem either has to use the strategy they will formulate as a basis (and this would totally negate any usefulness of coming up with the strategy) or their analysis assumes they use a different strategy than they actually end up using. So either they have to hear god proposing the deal wrong to execute on it right or they will get it right out of luck of assuming the right thing from the start. So contemplating on this issue you either come to know that your score is lower than it could be for another agent, realise that you don’t model yourself correctly, you get max score because you guessed right or that you can’t not know what your score is. Knowing that you solved the problem right is impossible.
Does it come in green?
I could have sworn that I have seen surreal integrals calculated as part of research into surreal mathematics. To me surreal calculus is a thing.
Are you sure you are not confusing how infinities are handled in other formalizations? Surreal addition is well defined and it takes no special form in the infinite range.
The sentence structure seems to suggest having a proof that such things are not possible but I am kinda getting the situation is more that you lack any proof that it is possible.
To me there is very big difference between 0 probability and an exact infinidesimal probability and I disagree that it is obvious they suffer from the same problems.
For example if I have a unit line and choose some particular point the probability of picking some exact point is epsilon. If I where to pick a point from a unit square the probability would be yet epsilon times smaller, for a total of epsilon*epsilon. If I where to pick a point from a line of lenght 2 the probability would only be half for a total of epsilon/2.
When usage of infinidesimal probabilites often fail is not spesifying which one and treating them all as the same one. It is not so that If you can’t multiply an amount finite times and end up with a finite amount then all such amounts must be equal. If I multiply epsilon by the first order infinite I get a finite 1. If I multiply epsilon*epsilon by the first order infinite I get a non-finite positive amount (exactly epsilon).
What impact infinite or infinidesimal probabilities make can largely be adopted by using rules to the same effect. An Example could be distinguishing between “pure” 0 and “almost never” and “pure” 1 and “almost always”. For what practical effect they might make consider darts. There are various probabilities conserning in which sector the dart lands and for example whether it it lands on a line dividing areas. However the numbers being passed around conserning lines will live a life largely separated by the math done for the areas. Now I can either take the separatedness as known fact outside the analysis or have the analysis show the separtedness of them. And there will be multiple types of zero probabilities. For example given that the board was hit, the probability for the dart not hitting any spesific area, line separating areas or a connection between lines is zero. However if I throw a dart I know I should not expect to hit that exact spot during the evening, the probability of it’s recurrence is an “impure” zero. The dart can still land there and it won’t magically avoid that spot. And no matter how many darts I throw the probability of hitting an old spot increases but I am not expecting to actually hit one. However if I notice that my probability of hitting an area divider or a line intersection is vanishing, in practise I know to focus on the area ratios, but I won’t accuse of someone of lying if they report a single such occurrence during the time I know such a man. However if they report 2 such occurrences I have reason to be suspicious.
There are some people that for religious reasons forego birth control causing bigger families. Am I correct in extrapolating that you would find that a child of such parents would have less basis to have their vote counted in equal force?
Even with telepathy status games and indirect hiding might still happen. And it depends also what kind of access. If everybody feels every thought of everybody else it could easily be overwhelming and pure cognitive economy could favour opting out.
If you can choose to access at will anybodys mental state you can adopt strategies to people not opt to do so in critical moments. If you build up yourself a reputation for violent thoughts people might want to try to avoid your mind out of comfort granting you a degree of privacy (similar effects for boringness etc). You could also attach meanings to your thoughts that other people would not associate in essence encrypting your mind so that they can’t natively read it in full clarity (even if they have full cryptotext access) (may or may not be synonymous with going mad).
If everybody has intimate psychological contact your mind could form dependencies to parts of other minds without which you could not psychologically function. So people might want to opt out for wanting to remain individuals and not fuse with the hive mind. Even if only others formed such dependencies could be bothersome because you don’t only think for yourself but potentially for others as well.
It seems to open a can of worms that would need to be dealt somehow and those solutions would be far more important to opting than whether it would be cool.
I have ceased to do this. It felt like being a judge and atleast a couple of discussion posts I probably discouraged the poster more with a reasoned downvote than with a silent downvote. It brought to my attention that I didn’t really have consistent, good or defensible way of voting. Not sure whether this expliciation would cause this to other users. My conception on what karma is and how it should be used has been mangled.
I am surprised that anyone from the internet can come and highjack the voting system to use as they see fit. I am putting the hammer down realising I didn’t know what I was building.
I once thought that mathematical geometry worked by a kind of detail crunching.
If a line is just a systematic set of infinite number of points checking whether two lines intersect would just be a “simple” operation to check whether they contain a point in common. Take points from one line and check whether it is a part of the other line. Doing this with literally infinite number of points would amount to a supertask. So you could only do so to an arbitrary precision but not exactly.
However a very simple math problem like “find the intersection of lines y=2x and y=3x+5” can be done exactly in a finite small number of symbol operations. And actually the description of the infinite number of points on the first line can be done by a very finite expression of “y=2x”. There are also an infinite number of such lines but finding each of their intersection doesn’t include attending them pair by pair. The procedure of solving the descriptions as a equation pair can be expressed in a expression more meta and “more finite”.
So instead of just a big fleet of lowest level comparisons what really happens is a tiny amount of work on different levels. If one would count each symbol manipulation as a single number crunching operation the supertask of point comparisons would seem to be the most demanding. However using multiple levels of symbols means supporting a wider array of symbol manipulation operations.
So while I appears that I compare infinite numbers of points when I am doing simple geometry, it’s just that I am bypassing one kind of calculations limits by using another kind of calculation.