Does that mean one can answer “Do you believe in magic?” with “No, but I believe in the existence of opaque proprietary APIs”?
soreff
harmful, unsympathetic psychopaths
There is another, quite different, situation where it happens: Highly stressed mothers of newborns.
The answer to this couldn’t be more clear: humans are very different from macaques. We’re much worse. The anxiety caused by human inequality is unlike anything observed in the natural world. In order to emphasize this point, Robert Sapolsky put all kidding aside and was uncharacteristically grim when describing the affects of human poverty on the incidence of stress-related disease.
“When humans invented poverty,” Sapolsky wrote, “they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever before seen in the primate world.”
This is clearly seen in studies looking at human inequality and the rates of maternal infanticide. The World Health Organization Report on Violence and Health reported a strong association between global inequality and child abuse, with the largest incidence in communities with “high levels of unemployment and concentrated poverty.” Another international study published by the American Journal of Psychiatry analyzed infanticide data from 17 countries and found an unmistakable “pattern of powerlessness, poverty, and alienation in the lives of the women studied.”
The United States currently leads the developed world with the highest maternal infanticide rate (an average of 8 deaths for every 100,000 live births, more than twice the rate of Canada). In a systematic analysis of maternal infanticide in the U.S., DeAnn Gauthier and colleagues at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette concluded that this dubious honor falls on us because “extreme poverty amid extreme wealth is conducive to stress-related violence.” Consequently, the highest levels of maternal infanticide were found, not in the poorest states, but in those with the greatest disparity between wealth and poverty (such as Colorado, Oklahoma, and New York with rates 3 to 5 times the national average). According to these researchers, inequality is literally killing our kids.
- 1 Jan 2012 17:06 UTC; 3 points) 's comment on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012) by (
Ow Ow Ow Ow
Weirdly enough, there is one prediction that looks like it panned out:
Repairing dental defects will also be revolutionized by the introduction of good, tough, and reliable polymers which will replace metallic amalgams. By the late 1990’s to early 2000’s biocompatible ceramics and coated polymers will be available that will allow for workable single tooth and multitooth gum-implanted prostheses.
It would have to be in the single least life-critical area.
A lot of those areas turned out to be intrinsically harder than anyone expected. Oncology, Alzheimer’s...
One thing that I just cannot understand: We had semi-workable artificial hearts 30 years ago. Now, yes, it is hard to make surfaces biocompatible. Still, that has been accomplished in many cases. As a society, we are reasonably good at mechanical engineering. How come a quarter of us still lose our live to the failure of a pump? We hear all the time about global warming, and sustainable this and recyclable that, and sometimes about what NASA might do. Prioritizing any of those things ahead of a decent permanent artificial heart is crazy.
It’s none of someone’s business why unless you choose to volunteer that information, and needing to know why you’ve just been turned down is a massive low-self-perceived-status signal.
Contrast this with the institution of the bug report in software. In programming, everyone expects that there are going to be some errors. Everyone learns from them, programmers, current users, prospective users… I consider the social institution of nonjudgmental bug reports to be, in and of itself, a substantial benefit from computer science to society at large.
time limits to tenure
Nice way to put it! To phrase it another way:
To argue in favor of mortality because of fears of entrenched conservatives is to demand capital punishment where term limits would suffice.
(replying to this so long after the comment was made because of seeing other recent comments on this thread) I don’t see it as a personal insult, but I don’t see it as novel either. I see it as part of the “why would people in the future bother reviving anyone from the 21st century?”. Its a standard objection, and the standard answer is that it isn’t very different from asking why people in the future would bother to give medical care to unknown people arriving at a hospital in an ambulance. If the society is rich enough, and humane enough, it will probably do both. If the society is either too poor or too inhumane, it will probably do neither. (I’m folding the technological capability of reviving a cryonicist in with measuring the wealth of the society) This isn’t fruitless iconoclasm, it is rehashing of decades-old discussions.
For a complex task, agreed. For a simple task, a failure rate of 10E-5 can happen. How often do people trying to eat put their forks in their eyes rather than in their mouths? And, to consider mechanical processes… If the cpu I’m running this browser on failed every 10E5 instructions, it would fail 10E4 times a second. It doesn’t.
I basically agree with you—The U.S. has certainly been headed in the direction of a winner-take-all society over the last few decades.
I think some of this is measurable. The Gini coefficient certainly captures some of the economic aspects, and it has gotten higher over time
“the underclass has been dehumanized to a degree barely precedented in human history” seem too strong. History includes slavery, including practices such as “seasoning”
I tend to groan at just about any use of the phrase “More Highly Evolved” as applicable to humans. If the phrase means anything, it would mean something like “is in a line of descent that has been through more rounds of Darwinian selection than some reference line”. And since bacteria can reproduce in ~20 minutes, and it takes humans ~20 years, the winner of that comparison is going to be in the former group, not the latter.
From my perspective, I think you’ve set too high a bar for yourself. I’m 51, with no very notable successes. I find just the ability to enjoy a sunset and a good meal sufficient reason to want to go on living, and were sufficient to motivate me to join Alcor. (Now the odds of being successfully revived are quite another matter, and subject to much disagreement.)
I believe that cryonics can maintain the network, but not the internal state of the nodes; consequently I assign “too low to meaningfully consider” to the probability of restoring my personality from my frozen brain.
There is experimental evidence to allay that specific concern. People have had flat EEGs (from barbituate poisoning, and from (non-cryogenic!) hypothermia). They’ve been revived with memories and personalities intact. The network, not transient electrical state, holds long term information. (Oops, partial duplication of Eliezer’s post below—I’m reasonably sure this has happened to humans as well, though...) (found the canine article: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1476969/)
This is starting to remind me of what happened to nutritional advice in the 1980s:
In nutrition “complex carbohydrates good! fats bad!” was widely promulgated
In dating “niceness/agreeableness good! alpha behavior bad!” was widely promulgated
in about the same time frame—and looks like it was comparably bad advice...
I’m not convinced. One very simple gain from
more memory capacity and processing speed
is the ability to consider more alternatives. These may be alternative explanations, designs, or courses of action. If I consider three alternatives where before I could only consider two, if the third one happens to be better than the other two, it is a real gain. This applies directly to the case of
carry on using the same ineffective medical treatments because of failure to think of alternative causes
Ouch! “The more I find out, the less that I know”. This site gives extensive statistics, broken out nationally and by year from 2000-2010. According to their numbers, for 2010, Korea had the largest numbers of hours worked, with the U.S. 12th on the list and Japan 15th. It looks like the shifts across this decade are considerable (10%-20%, for many of the nations). Looking at a bunch of sites, there seems to be considerable differences in reported numbers as well—the definitions of what hours they include and who they include may differ...
For example, if you try to make very small, spherical diamond crystals, a layer or two of carbon atoms at the surface will spontaneously rearrange themselves into a new form—not of diamond, but of graphite.
What do we count as “spherical”? Adamantane is a symmetrical 10 carbon atom piece of a diamond lattice, with surface bonds terminated with hydrogen atoms. It is stable enough to be melted at 270C and recrystallized from the melt. It does not rearrange itself into graphite.
More generally: AFMs and STMs routinely use atomically precise positioning in the presence of thermal noise (the vibrational analog of Brownian motion) at room temperature. Set aside Drexler’s analyses of thermal and quantum motions in molecular scale device for a moment: At this point we’ve had multiple decades of experimental experience of atomically precise positioning at room temperature. The tips of these devices are molecular scale structures being positioned with atomic precision. Sufficient?
Agreed—consider C60. Would anyone in 1980 have believed that there was an unrecognized allotrope of carbon, stable at room temperature and pressure? To phrase it another way: The whole field of organic chemistry had been active for about a century at that point, and had not noticed another structure for their core element in all that time.
Agreed. If nothing else, in a bargaining process, keeping the maximum/minimum price that one would accept private during the negotiation doesn’t fit into either category.
I’m inclined to agree with steven0461,
Lots of people choose luxury over saving 28 lives.
Actually, this is true even for rather low values of “luxury”. I, like tens of millions of other people in the developed world, am a homeowner. Yes, the cost of my (rather modest) home would have saved ~100 lives if I had instead donated it to a maximally effective charity. That isn’t what I did. That isn’t what the other tens of millions of homeowners did. If you want to count that as sociopathic behavior, fine. But that casts a rather wide net for what would count in that category. Is “sociopathic behavior” even a useful category if it is extended so widely? Is there much behavior left that falls outside it?
Can one use the backwards-E existence symbol as one of the letters?
And what is the probability that one of them is a Prior?