Spiracular

• Spiracular 14 Aug 2019 7:02 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: ChristianKl's comment on: Why is the ni­tro­gen cy­cle so un­der-em­pha­sized com­pared to cli­mate change

  But when the ar­gu­ment for the al­ter­na­tive boils down to “eat shit, not chem­i­cals”...

  I’m kid­ding, but only slightly. Or­ganic fer­til­iza­tion is a bit gross, and I think most food com­pa­nies would pre­fer to not be as­so­ci­ated with any of dead leaf mat­ter, rot­ting lef­tovers, or ma­nure.

  Coun­ter­ar­gu­ment: Com­post­ing to­tally be­came a thing, and that po­ten­tially puts the gross­ness right in your back­yard.

  (Huh. Com­post­ing is cer­tainly some­thing peo­ple do on an in­di­vi­d­ual level to micro-com­bat the us­age of ni­tro­gen fer­til­iz­ers, with prob­a­bly a very neg­ligible effect. And some peo­ple do seem ded­i­cated to it. But I sus­pect that if you asked most peo­ple who do it, they would claim it’s about land­fills or some­thing, not soil ni­tro­gen con­tent.)

• Spiracular 14 Aug 2019 5:39 UTC

  24 points

  on: Why do hu­mans not have built-in neu­ral i/​o chan­nels?

  Even if it had evolved, any de­tailed form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that had the po­ten­tial to trans­mit hard-to-break im­per­a­tives is some­thing you want to be very, very care­ful with.

  Defec­tion, ma­nipu­la­tion, and novel av­enues for dis­ease-trans­mis­sion or par­a­sitism heav­ily dis­in­cen­tivize this. It’s in­tu­itively “gross” for a rea­son.

  TL;DR: In­fec­tions and defec­tions would prob­a­bly ut­terly wreck this. The blood-brain bar­rier ex­ists for a rea­son. While we did get lan­guage, in other ways we’ve evolved speci­fi­cally to hide in­for­ma­tion from each other; it’s not straight­for­wardly evolu­tion­ar­ily fa­vored. Large clusters of highly-re­lated or­ganisms have more in­cen­tive to do this (bac­te­rial mats, ants, our own cells, etc.), and the in­for­ma­tion-band­width they share with each other through pheromones and chem­i­cal sig­nals is ac­tu­ally pretty stag­ger­ing. But at a glance, I do think they pay a cost in in­creased (and more elab­o­rate) av­enues for ma­nipu­la­tions and in­fec­tions to reap the benefits of this priv­ilege.

  Edit to add: Link­ing some ad­di­tional strongly-re­lated ar­ti­cles! SSC’s Maybe Your Zoloft Stopped Work­ing Be­cause a Liver Fluke Tried To Turn Your Nth-Great-Grand­mother into a Zom­bie and the pa­per it cen­ters on, In­visi­ble De­sign­ers: Brain Evolu­tion Through the Lens of Par­a­site Manipulation

  Iso­lat­ing Brains from Infection

  It bears point­ing out that evolu­tion usu­ally seems to want the op­po­site of this for our cen­tral­ized-de­ci­sion-maker or­gans. No­tice that in­stead of mak­ing the brain more open-ac­cess over time, most species went the di­rec­tion of mak­ing it iso­lated from even our own bod­ies, us­ing things like the heavy-fil­ter­ing brain/​blood bar­rier. The risk of that sen­si­tive or­gan get­ting poi­soned, dis­eased, or biolog­i­cally ma­nipu­lated was just too high to risk it.

  (Ne­ma­todes make what hu­mans call “em­bod­ied think­ing” look like a joke; the sero­tonin from their di­ges­tive tract is felt by their brains di­rectly.)

  Peo­ple used to die in droves (and at young ages!) of measles, tu­ber­cu­lo­sis, and a mil­lion other things. Even be­fore cities, herd-liv­ing put us un­der im­mense pres­sure to de­velop a pretty in­tensely spe­cial­ized im­mune sys­tem. If we had to worry about giv­ing a dis­ease a high­way to our cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem, that would be… very, very bad. It might even guaran­tee that such a species would never get to cen­tral­ize such things at all, such a force is the risk of in­fec­tion.

  Not to even get into the pos­si­bil­ity of phys­i­cal brain-hi­jack­ings by con­cepts (like memes, but oh-so-much-worse!), or even just catch­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion-trans­mit­ted Kuru… but here’s a pretty vivid spec­u­la­tive de­scrip­tion of just how bad be­ing an evolved “open book” that granted oth­ers write-ac­cess would prob­a­bly get.

  And with re­gards to the “benefits” of open com­mu­ni­ca­tion -of in­for­ma­tion con­veyed in a lan­guage that’s very hard to fake- we do still have some in­for­ma­tion trans­mit­ted in body-lan­guage and words. That cer­tainly cap­tures some of the benefit. But it bears point­ing out that we’re a species that un-evolved any ob­vi­ous pre­sen­ta­tion of whether a fe­male is in es­trus, and has very strong in­hi­bi­tions around try­ing not to gain in­for­ma­tion from each other’s body odor. “Com­plete, to­tal hon­esty” is not some­thing evolu­tion typ­i­cally se­lects for, and it didn’t veer en­tirely that way for us. Even in the less-cut­throat mod­ern era (at least, com­pared to our dis­tant sa­van­nah past), Greg Egan’s Closer feels like a pretty re­al­is­tic de­pic­tion of how we might feel about it if we ever did fully share our men­tal ex­pe­rience with even one an­other per­son. I’ll avoid spoiling it too badly, but we’d prob­a­bly quickly un­cover a lot of things about one other that we wished we didn’t know.

  Some Liv­ing Approximates

  Bac­te­rial mats, gi­ant net­works of fungi, and eu­so­cial in­sects with strong ge­netic kin­ship might have strong enough evolu­tion­ary in­cen­tives for this to line up, al­though higher re­lat­ed­ness ac­tu­ally ex­ac­er­bates the in­fec­tion con­cern. And be­tween the cells of mul­ti­cel­lu­lar creat­ues, cer­tainly quite a lot does get com­mu­ni­cated. Many of these ex­am­ples do seem to “share their mind” in at least some mean­ingful sense. They trans­mit a lot of in­for­ma­tion and or­ders to one an­other, and have a com­mu­nal de­ci­sion-mak­ing pro­cess at vary­ing de­grees of cen­tral­iza­tion/​de­cen­tral­iza­tion. Pheromones for in­sects, var­i­ous sig­nal­ling se­cre­tions from bac­te­ria, the oo­dles of trans­ac­tions and de­liv­er­ies be­tween our cells at ev­ery mo­ment… com­bined these can be very high-band­width. Al­most in­com­pre­hen­si­bly so, if you’ve ever seen at­tempts to mea­sure and chart such things.

  Ants could prac­ti­cally be said to have a pheromone “lan­guage,” com­plete with clan-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tags. And as a way to se­lec­tively trig­ger a highly-spe­cific neu­ral path­way, or ac­ti­vate a known set of be­hav­iors in a con­spe­cific with the same brain-con­figu­ra­tion, pheromones are not a bad way to go? The be­hav­ior pat­terns pheromones set off can get oddly spe­cific at times.

  And… ants also get tricked by pheromones into feed­ing the brood par­a­sites that eat their own young. And what we call “bac­te­rial sex” (high-band­width com­mu­ni­ca­tion of DNA?) is ac­tu­ally virus-es­que plas­mids try­ing to trans­mit them­selves to new bac­te­ria, like an in­fec­tion. Some plas­mids might even come with ad­dic­tion molecules, which is an ex­tra-douchey way for an plas­mid to con­vey “repli­cate me, or die.” And in co­or­di­nated bac­te­ria, you do some­times see defec­tors. So… it’s still pretty ma­nipu­la­ble, and it sure gets ma­nipu­lated.

  The more stereo­typed be­hav­iors you can set off through ex­ter­nal sig­nals, the more you have a “broader at­tack sur­face,” in the cy­ber­se­cu­rity lingo. And biolog­i­cal par­a­sitism is ubiquitous, and frac­tal­ine, and adap­tive, and uses any damn at­tack sur­face it can get.

  Hu­mans? A fluke. Par­a­sites are evolu­tion’s true dar­lings.

• Spiracular 7 Aug 2019 22:20 UTC

  9 points

  on: Why is the ni­tro­gen cy­cle so un­der-em­pha­sized com­pared to cli­mate change

  I thought this was an in­ter­est­ing ques­tion… al­though I definitely get the feel­ing like I’m miss­ing some of the con­text be­hind this “plane­tary bound­aries” write-up.

  (What is the Stock­holm Re­silience Cen­ter? What are its mo­tives and meth­ods? Why was it do­ing this anal­y­sis, and how did you end up run­ning into it?)

  I agree that fer­til­izer runoff gets talked about a lot less than cli­mate change, and I’m not en­tirely sure of why that is. I just looked it up, and “Or­ganic”-la­beled things ap­par­ently do already man­date or­ganic fer­til­iz­ers (which should be N-neu­tral on net?). So there’s at least that.

  Re­gard­ing their as­sess­ment… one of the fac­tors that seemed to be weighted a lot in their as­sess­ment was “level of antro­pogenic change vs nat­u­ral vari­a­tion in Pro­cess X.” I’d ex­pect that to have heav­ily-weighted the Nitro­gen Cy­cle, since our in­terfer­ence in it dwarves the vari­abil­ity due to nat­u­ral pro­cesses (some­thing they them­selves spell out. The Haber pro­cess is a strange, pow­er­ful, mag­i­cal, in­or­ganic thing the hu­mans cooked up).

  This met­ric is… not pre­cisely the same as “level of dam­age this change can cause.” They seem to have set up some sort of thresh­old for what they con­sider “dan­ger­ously high”, and I don’t re­ally un­der­stand the thought-pro­cess or rea­son­ing they used in pick­ing those thresh­olds. But I think they fac­tored “change vs nat­u­ral vari­a­tion” into their think­ing a good deal.

  My un­der­stand­ing from my own Ag back­ground is that fer­til­izer runoff re­ally can be a big prob­lem; ni­tro­gen and phos­pho­rus are a ma­jor limit­ing nu­tri­ent for plant-life, both on land and in fresh­wa­ter ecosys­tems (the ocean sur­face is iron-limited, in­ter­est­ingly). In a sense, this is ex­actly why we use it; we want our food crops to grow at a wild rate, one rarely seen in na­ture.

  When there’s a sud­den in­flux of ni­tro­gen into a fresh­wa­ter sys­tem, one of the pos­si­ble con­se­quences is an al­gal bloom. Th­ese go through a boom-and-bust cy­cle (with the sea­sons, or re­source-availa­bil­ity pat­terns), lead­ing to a mas­sive al­gal die-off. Dur­ing this die-off, de­cay bac­te­ria wipe out the un­der­wa­ter oxy­gen-sup­ply, lead­ing to knock-on effects on fresh­wa­ter ecosys­tems like mas­sive fish die-offs. En­closed spaces like lakes are per­haps es­pe­cially vuln­er­a­ble, since there is no way for the N and P to ever exit the sys­tem, po­ten­tially per­pet­u­at­ing the cy­cle in­definitely.

  That said, sud­denly cut­ting fer­til­izer us­age would prac­ti­cally en­sure that food pro­duc­tion would sud­denly drop way down, and that would ill-serve a lot of other hu­man val­ues. Re­duc­ing runoff looks like a very hard prob­lem, to me. Find­ing ways to re­move ex­cess P and N from en­vi­ron­ment seemed to be an area with at least a lit­tle bit of in­ter­est, but it doesn’t seem very ac­tion­able on an in­di­vi­d­ual rather than city or state level, which might ex­plain the low pub­lic­ity? Un­sure.

• Spiracular 5 Aug 2019 23:36 UTC

  7 points

  on: Per­mis­sions in Governance

  Some rules seem to have an el­e­ment of “cost of com­pli­ance” that re­lies on be­ing able to pre­dict the fu­ture, in a way that even spe­cial­ists have lit­tle hope of do­ing. Some­times, this leads to a risk-taker-en­riched (aka ass­hole-filtered) gray zone sur­round­ing a well of value which may-or-may-not have been poi­soned (some­thing of a Shroed­inger’s Well?).

  If the gray zone is valuable, then for a while, the mar­ket might heav­ily fa­vor gray-area vi­o­la­tors of this type. But oc­ca­sion­ally, one of these zones sud­denly trans­forms into a trap for gray-area vi­o­la­tors at all lev­els of com­pe­tence. At least in the­ory, I could see some law-mak­ers de­ploy­ing this va­ri­ety of illeg­ible rules on pur­pose, to use that as a wasp-trap for sneaky, com­pe­tent bound­ary-push­ers. I have very lit­tle idea of whether this ac­tu­ally hap­pens on-pur­pose much, and a lot of things that might ini­tially look like this prob­a­bly turn out to be “you gotta know a guy” in ret­ro­spect.

  Some ex­am­ples I can think of that might fit this pat­tern...

  The ques­tion of ex­actly which fi­nan­cial reg­u­la­tions would be deemed “ap­pli­ca­ble to Bit­coin” was go­ing to have to be done largely in ret­ro­spect, and I think even spe­cial­ists largely couldn’t make re­li­able pre­dic­tions about this. On a re­lated note, I know a story where a pre-blockchain gold-backed on­line cur­rency tried to get a per­mit and was pro­hibited, due to reg­u­la­tors de­cid­ing that they didn’t fall into the rele­vant refer­ence class. This com­pany was later pe­nal­ized into bankruptcy for op­er­at­ing with­out that per­mit, when a later court rul­ing de­cided that they did fall into that refer­ence class.

  More broadly, the ques­tion of “will rules around patents will be lev­er­aged against you” seems to some­times fall near this gray-zone. That one’s damp­en­ing pro­file is a bit weirder and com­pli­cated, though. The damp­en­ing-effect there seems to be dis­pro­por­tionately borne by the medium- to well-funded. It seems to re­ward ob­scu­rity, be­cause small cor­po­ra­tions are usu­ally not worth go­ing af­ter about patent vi­o­la­tions. Medium-sized ones might be, and of­ten set­tle out of court to avoid a law­suit, mak­ing it prof­itable to go af­ter them; I would guess that they’re the ones pe­nal­ized the worst by this, but I’m not cer­tain. Top cor­po­ra­tions prob­a­bly fall some­where in-be­tween; on the one hand, they tend to have good lawyers (re­pel­ling frivolous law­suits), but on the other hand, they might stand to lose a very large sum in court.

  Pos­si­bly any­thing where court rul­ings be­ing made on the same case seem to see-saw back-and-forth as it goes up lev­els.

• Spiracular 6 Jul 2019 0:39 UTC

  12 points

  on: Spirac­u­lar’s Short­form Feed

  I stum­bled into a satis­fy­ing vi­sual de­scrip­tion:

  3D “Ren­der­ers” of Ran­dom Sam­pling/​Monte Carlo estimation

  This came out of think­ing about ex­plain­ing sparse­ness in higher di­men­sions*, and I started get­ting into vi­su­als (as I am known to do). I’ve see most of the things be­low de­scribed in 2D (some­times in­cred­ibly well!), but 3D is a tad trick­ier, while not be­ing nearly as painfully-un­in­tu­itive as 4D. Here’s what I came up with!

  Also, some­one’s prob­a­bly already done this, but… shrug?

  The Setup

  In a sim­ple case of Monte Carlo/​ran­dom-sam­pling from a three-di­men­sional space with a one-di­men­sional bi­nary or float out­put...

  You’re try­ing to work out what is in a sealed box us­ing only a thin nee­dle (anal­ogy for the func­tion that pro­duces your re­sults). The nee­dle has a limited num­ber of draws, but you can aim the nee­dle re­ally well. You can use it to find out what color the ob­ject in the box is at each of the ex­act points you de­cided to mea­sure. You also have an open box in which to mark off the ex­act spot in space at which you did the draw, us­ing Unob­tainium to keep it in place.

  Each of your sam­ples is a fixed point in space, with a color set by the nee­dle(func­tion/​sam­pler’s) out­put/​re­sult. Th­ese are go­ing to be the cores that you base your ren­der around. From there, you can...

  Near­est Neigh­bor Render

  For Near­est Neigh­bor (NN), you can see what hap­pens when you situ­ate col­ored-or-clear bal­loons at each of the sam­ple points, and start si­mul­ta­neously blow­ing up all of them up with their sam­ple point as a loose cen­ter. Grad­u­ally, this will give you a bad “ren­der­ing” of what­ever the color-re­sults were de­scribing.

  (Tech­ni­cally it’s Voronoi re­gions; bal­loons are more evoca­tive)

  De­ci­sion Trees

  De­ci­sion trees are when you fill in the space us­ing col­ored rec­t­an­gu­lar blocks of vary­ing sizes, based on the sam­ple points.

  Gradients

  Most other meth­ods in­volve cre­at­ing a gra­di­ent be­tween 2 differ­ent points that yielded differ­ent col­ors. It could be a lin­ear gra­di­ent, an ex­po­nen­tial gra­di­ent, a step func­tion, a sine wave, some other com­pli­cated gra­di­ent… as you get more com­pli­cated, you bet­ter hope that your pri­ors were re­ally good!

  Neu­ral Net

  A hu­man with lots of prior ex­pe­rience look­ing at similar ob­jects tries to in­fer what the rest looks like. (This is kinda a troll an­swer, I know. Think­ing about it.)

  Sam­ple All The Things!

  3D Poin­til­lism even just sounds like a re­ally bad idea. Poin­til­lism on a 2D sur­face in a 3D space, not as bad of an idea! Spar­sity at work?

  Bonus

  The Blind Men and an Elephant fable is an ex­am­ple of why you don’t want to do a ren­der from a sin­gle dat­a­point, or else you might de­cide that the en­tire world is “pure rope.” If they’d known from sound where each other were lo­cated when they touched the elephant, and had listened to what the oth­ers were ob­serv­ing, they might have ac­tu­ally Near­est Neigh­bor’d them­selves a pretty de­cent ap­prox­i­mate elephant.

  *Speci­fi­cally, how it’s dra­mat­i­cally more effort to get a high-re­s­olu­tion pixel-by-pixel pic­ture of a high-di­men­sional space. But if you’re will­ing to sac­ri­fice ac­cu­racy for faster cov­er­age, in high di­men­sions a sin­gle point’s Near­est Neigh­bor zone can slop­pily cover a whole lot of ground (or mul­ti­di­men­sional “vol­ume”).

• Spiracular 2 Jul 2019 21:53 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Spiracular's comment on: Spirac­u­lar’s Short­form Feed

  I have this vague in­tu­ition that some wa­ter-liv­ing or­ganisms have fuzzier self-en­vi­ron­ment bound­aries than most land or­ganisms. It sorta makes sense. Liv­ing in wa­ter, you might at least get close to match­ing your nu­tri­tional, hy­dra­tional, ther­mal, and dis­per­sion needs via low-effort diffu­sion. In con­trast, on land you al­most cer­tainly need to cre­ate strongly-defined bound­aries be­tween your­self and “air” or “rock”, since en­vi­ron­ments can reach dan­ger­ous ex­tremes.

  Fungi feel like a bit of an ex­cep­tion, though, with their ex­tra­cel­lu­lar di­ges­tion habits.

• Spiracular 2 Jul 2019 21:53 UTC

  8 points

  on: Spirac­u­lar’s Short­form Feed

  If The Ocean was a DM:

  Player: I want to play a brain­less in­com­pletely-mul­ti­ceul­lu­lar glob with no sep­a­ra­tion be­tween its anus and its mouth and who might have an abil­ity like “glow in the dark” or “eject or­gans and then grow them back.” It eats tiny rocks in the wa­ter column.

  The Land DM: No! At least have some sen­si­ble dis­tri­bu­tion-of-nu­tri­ents gim­mick! Like, you’re not even try­ing! Like, I’m not anti-slimes, I’ll al­low some of this for the Slime Mold, but they had a clever me­chanic for suc­cinctly gen­er­at­ing wider path­ways for nu­tri­ent trans­fer be­tween high-nu­tri­tion ar­eas that I’d be happy to...

  The Ocean DM: OMG THAT’S MY FAVORITE THING. Do you have any other char­ac­ter con­cepts? Like, maybe it can also eject its brain and grow it back? Or maybe its go­nads are also in the sin­gle hole where the mouth and anus are?

  The Land DM: …

• Spiracular 19 Jun 2019 17:14 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: habryka's comment on: Un­rol­ling so­cial metacog­ni­tion: Three lev­els of meta are not enough.

  ...huh. I guess I know of one par­tic­u­lar va­ri­ety, and that va­ri­ety is very self-con­tained and cir­cling-ad­ja­cent (I al­most could have called it “Nar­ra­tive Cir­cling”, if that didn’t seem like such a con­tra­dic­tion-in-terms). But from the wiki ar­ti­cle, T-Group ap­pears to re­fer to a more neb­u­lous and broad cat­e­gory of things, some of which seem not nearly so self-con­tained.

  The thing I had run into func­tioned ba­si­cally as de­scribed here (scroll down for the writ­ten de­scrip­tion). This read to me as clearly ci­cling-ad­ja­cent, and I didn’t think all that hard about where it had come from.

  The wikipe­dia de­scrip­tion struck me as sur­pris­ingly un­in­for­ma­tive about the de­tails of the prac­tice it­self. But from pok­ing around a bit on the in­ter­net just now… I get the im­pres­sion that T-Group can re­fer to some­thing similar to what I de­scribed, but can also be used to re­fer to some­thing close to an ex­per­i­men­tal lead­er­ship/​de­ci­sion-mak­ing struc­ture that uses the “T-Group” as part of their in­tra­group con­flict-re­s­olu­tion method?

  I knew that the va­ri­ety I had run into was a bit home­brew, and prob­a­bly had as­pects of cir­cling bred into it. I don’t think I ap­pre­ci­ated just how differ­ent it could be from other peo­ple’s us­age of/​con­text for the term. That said, I do see some signs of shared lineage.

  The tech­niques feel re­lated, and the fa­cil­i­tat­ing ethos of aware­ness, learn­ing, hon­esty, and goalless­ness feels similar. But the va­ri­ety I ran into felt more tightly-defined and com­part­men­tal­ized, and I was mostly do­ing it with strangers.

  I ad­mit that with a high bar of trust and de­cently com­mit­ted par­ti­ci­pants, I could ac­tu­ally see it work­ing well as a so­cial-in­for­ma­tion-gath­er­ing method? But the idea of be­ing dragged into do­ing it with cowork­ers, or of treat­ing it like a pri­mary con­flict-re­s­olu­tion tech­nique, seems quite trou­bling to me.

• Spiracular 17 Jun 2019 19:42 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: elityre's comment on: Un­rol­ling so­cial metacog­ni­tion: Three lev­els of meta are not enough.

  Cir­cling is work­ing on a similar prob­lem, and train­ing ca­pac­i­ties that are used as workarounds: This feels true to me.

  I think this even more visi­ble in the cir­cling-var­i­ant called “T-Group,” where peo­ple tell a short nar­ra­tive on why they think they’re hav­ing a de­scribed emo­tional re­ac­tion. Very fre­quently, the ex­pla­na­tions en­cap­su­late 1-2 lay­ers of meta, or ex­plic­itly ges­ture at cer­tain/​un­cer­tain pieces of com­mon knowl­edge.

  (ex: Joe is re­spond­ing to Jane’s re­sponse and feels U, Jane is re­spond­ing to Jane’s in­ter­pre­ta­tion of Joe’s re­sponse to Jane and feels V. Albert notes X, mod­els that Betty would be trou­bled by X, and feels con­cern that there might not be com­mon knowl­edge of this. Betty be­lieves that there is com­mon knowl­edge of X, and that ev­ery­one feels wary about it. Betty queries if any­one dis­agrees with that in­ter­pre­ta­tion. Car­rie notes that she hadn’t ini­tially been aware of X, but is now aware of X, and feels sad and a lit­tle scared.)

  When I look at it this way, it be­comes even clearer why T-Group comes with an ex­hor­ta­tion to always in­clude the ex­pe­riencer as an ob­ject in your sen­tence (“I feel”, “I make it mean”, “I in­fer”). If the next per­son is go­ing to do meta on your meta, it helps if they don’t need to re­calcu­late out the layer rep­re­sent­ing “you,” and it’s use­ful to ex­plic­itly differ­en­ti­ate be­tween your­self and com­mon knowl­edge.

  (Ac­tu­ally, the more I think about it, the more T-Group looks like a hy­brid be­tween cir­cling and ex­plicit mod­el­ing. And the fact that they work well to­gether sug­gests to me that not ev­ery­thing in the cir­cling skil­lset gets eclipsed when you switch to ex­plicit-mod­el­ing.)

• Spiracular 17 Jun 2019 17:15 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Mary Chernyshenko's comment on: Naked mole-rats: A case study in biolog­i­cal weirdness

  Ticks just re­peat­edly break my in­tu­itions. How does some­thing that small and R-se­lected have a 2-year-long life­cy­cle?

  Oh good­ness yes, fungi. Two-nu­clei sex­ual stages star­tled me when I first learned of it. It’s a highly-di­verse and suc­cess­ful clade, filling in an ar­ray of niches all across the spe­cial­ist/​gen­er­al­ist spec­trum, and rang­ing any­where from uni­cel­lu­lar to syn­cy­tial to or­ganisms the size of a city. Plus, many of them seem to man­i­fest that evolu­tion­ary pseudo-”in­ven­tive­ness” that I usu­ally as­so­ci­ate with bac­te­ria.

• Spiracular 15 Jun 2019 2:10 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Spirac­u­lar’s Short­form Feed

  Yeah… this is read­ing as more “mor­al­iz­ing” and “com­bat­ive” than as “try­ing to un­der­stand and model my view,” to me. I do not feel like putting more time into hash­ing this out with you, so I most likely won’t re­ply.

  It has a very… “gotcha” feel to it. Even the cu­ri­os­ity seems to be phrased to be slightly ac­cusatory, which re­ally doesn’t help mat­ters. Maybe we have in­com­pat­i­ble con­ver­sa­tion styles.

• Spiracular 15 Jun 2019 0:58 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Spirac­u­lar’s Short­form Feed

  (Meta-note: I spent more time on this than I wanted to. I think if I run into this sort of ques­tion again, I’m go­ing to ask clar­ify­ing ques­tions about what it was that you in par­tic­u­lar wanted, be­cause an­swer­ing broad ques­tions with­out hav­ing a clear in­ter­nal idea of a tar­get au­di­ence con­tributed to both spend­ing too much time on this, and con­tributed to feel­ing bad about it. Oops.)

• Spiracular 15 Jun 2019 0:57 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Spirac­u­lar’s Short­form Feed

  Per­son­ally, one of the most damn­ing marks against the phys­i­cal-dis­tance in­tu­ition in par­tic­u­lar is its ram­pant ex­ploita­bil­ity in the mod­ern world, where dis­tance is so in­cred­ibly eas­ily abridged. If some­one set up a deal where they ex­tract some money and kid­nap 2 far-away peo­ple in ex­change for let­ting 1 nearby per­son go, some­one with phys­i­cal-dis­tance-dis­count­ing might keep mak­ing this deal, and the only thing the kid­nap­pers would need to use to ex­ploit it is a truck. If view through a cam­era is enough to abridge the phys­i­cal dis­tance, it’s even eas­ier to ex­ploit. I think this premise is played around with in me­dia like The Box, but I’ve also heard of some re­ally awful real-world cases, es­pe­cially if phone calls or video count as abridg­ing dis­tance (for a lot of peo­ple, it seems to). The ease and sever­ity of ex­ploita­tion of it definitely con­tributes to why, in the mod­ern world, I don’t just call it un­in­tu­itive, I call it straight-up bro­ken.

  When the go­ing ex­change rate be­tween time and phys­i­cal dis­tance was higher, this in­tu­ition might not have been so bro­ken. With the speed of trans­port where it is now...

  Maybe at bot­tom, it’s also just not very in­tu­itive to me. I find a cer­tain hu­mor in par­o­dies of it, which I’m go­ing to badly ap­prox­i­mate here.

  “As you move away from me at a con­stant speed, how rapidly should I morally dis­count you? Should the dis­count­ing be ex­po­nen­tial, or log­a­r­ith­mic?”

  “A run­away trol­ley will kill 5 peo­ple tied to the train track, un­less you pull a switch and redi­rect it to a nearby track with only 1 per­son on it. Do you pull the switch?” “Well, that de­pends. Are the 5 peo­ple fur­ther away from me?”

  I do won­der where that lack-of-in­tu­ition comes from… Maybe my lack of this in­tu­ition was origi­nally be­cause when I imag­ine things hap­pen­ing to some­one nearby and some­one far away, the real ob­ject I’m in­ter­act­ing with in judg­ing /​com­par­ing is the imag­i­na­tion-con­struct in my head, and if they’re both equally vivid that col­lapses all felt phys­i­cal dis­tance? Who can say.

  In my heart of hearts, though… if all else is truly equal, it also does just feel ob­vi­ous that a per­son’s phys­i­cal dis­tance from you re­ally should not af­fect your sense of their moral worth.

• Spiracular 15 Jun 2019 0:50 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Spirac­u­lar’s Short­form Feed

  I think you’re in­fer­ring some things that aren’t there. I’m not claiming an agent-neu­tral moral­ity. I’m claiming that “phys­i­cal prox­im­ity,” in par­tic­u­lar, be­ing a ma­jor fac­tor of moral worth in-and-of-it­self never re­ally made sense to me, and always seemed a bit cringey.

  Us­ing phys­i­cal prox­im­ity as a rele­vant met­ric in judg­ing the value of al­li­ances? Fac­tor­ing other met­rics of prox­im­ity into my per­sonal as­sess­ments of moral worth? I do both.

  (Although I think us­ing agent-neu­tral meth­ods to gen­er­ate Schel­ling Points for co­or­di­na­tion rea­sons is quite valuable, and at times where that co­or­di­na­tion is re­ally im­por­tant, I tend to weight it ex­tremely heav­ily.)

  When I limit my­self to look­ing at char­ity and not al­li­ance-for­ma­tion, all types of prox­im­ity-en­courag­ing mo­tives get drowned out by the sheer size of the differ­ence in mag­ni­tude-of-need and the dras­ti­cally-in­creased buy­ing power of first-world money in parts of the third world. I think that’s a pretty com­mon feel­ing among EAs. That said, I do con­duct a stronger level of time- and un­cer­tainty-dis­count­ing, but I still ended up be­ing pretty con­cerned about ex­is­ten­tial risk.

• Spiracular 14 Jun 2019 19:36 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Benquo's comment on: Naked mole-rats: A case study in biolog­i­cal weirdness

  The strange pres­sures of their sub­ter­ranean lifestyle, which eu­kary­ote de­scribed some­what, prob­a­bly cov­ers most of it. In­breed­ing/​iso­la­tion is prob­a­bly the other half of the puz­zle.

  I’ll try to show how some of these traits tie in with low-oxy­gen and sub­ter­ranean liv­ing, in those places where it wasn’t already cov­ered.

  1. A lot of these do bot­tom out to the pres­sures of cre­at­ing a large nest, and deal­ing with an un­der­ground low-oxy­gen en­vi­ron­ment.

  Eu­so­cial­ity and large pro­tec­tive com­mu­nal nest-build­ing mesh to­gether re­ally well, which I think fed into a lot of the items in the Richard Alexan­der list of pre­dic­tions men­tioned above (the ac­cu­racy is re­ally im­pres­sive!).

  Lack-of-hair and weird teeth seem pretty ob­vi­ously de­vel­oped for dig­ging/​crawl­ing lifestyle. Acid-pain im­mu­nity has been pro­posed to be a con­se­quence of hav­ing to han­dle an oth­er­wise-in­tol­er­able level of lac­tic acid buildup (‘sore mus­cles’) while dig­ging in low-oxy­gen zones. The strange metabolic prop­er­ties (which prob­a­bly feed into can­cer re­sis­tance con­sid­er­ably) also seem to be a way to han­dle their lower-oxy­gen-availa­bil­ity lifestyle; en­dothermy can be sur­pris­ingly en­ergy-in­ten­sive.

  Really, liv­ing a low-tem­per­a­ture low-sugar care­ful-en­ergy-us­age low-am­bi­ent-cell-repli­ca­tion lifestyle tends to defend against can­cer and im­prove lifes­pan quite a bit in gen­eral (ex: calorie re­stric­tion for mam­mals of­ten ex­tends lifes­pan, rais­ing fruit flies at low tem­per­a­tures can full-on dou­ble it). Mol­er­ats seem to have been un­der heavy pres­sure to biolog­i­cally en­force a strict en­ergy-us­age reg­i­men, and they take this to an in­cred­ible ex­treme. So you’d ex­pect to see some can­cer re­sis­tance, al­though it’s still crazy in terms of de­gree.

  (I’d to­tally buy that they prob­a­bly have some ad­di­tional nutty things go­ing for them. I think I’ve heard a the­ory that they have un­usu­ally-stringent cell check­points pre-di­vi­sion?)

  1. In­breed­ing and ge­netic isolation

  No, re­ally. It’s both a strong push to­wards kin-se­lec­tion (a ba­sis of eu­so­cial­ity if there ever was one), and an ex­ac­er­ba­tor of ge­netic drift. The changes might not always be any­where near this fa­vor­able, but iso­la­tion still tilts things to­wards the weird, and the faster rate to sat­u­ra­tion in­creases your abil­ity to build adap­ta­tions on top of adap­ta­tions. (see also: high weird­ness for species liv­ing in is­lands, caves).

• Spiracular 14 Jun 2019 17:00 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Mary Chernyshenko's comment on: Naked mole-rats: A case study in biolog­i­cal weirdness

  Ad­ding a cou­ple of mine to this list, will prob­a­bly add more as I think of them...

  In­ver­te­brates: Sac­culina (par­a­sitic bar­na­cle that hor­mon­ally ma­nipu­lates crabs), Sawflies (prim­i­tive hy­menopter­ans with cater­pillar-like lar­vae, some love for­est fires), Ticks, Phen­garis arion

  Ver­te­brates: Chameleon, Hoatzin, Bats (just… bats)

  Plants: Amor­phophal­lus genus (The en­tire stalk is a sin­gle gi­ant leaf. It sheds that leaf ev­ery few years, puts up a gi­ant flower, then sheds that and goes back to grow­ing an­other sin­gle gi­ant leaf?), Orchids, Mag­no­lia (an­cient mono­cots that con­ver­gently evolved to look like di­cots, flow­ers that pre­date bees)

  I’m giv­ing par­tial-points to: scale in­sects, fig wasps, ter­mites, Neotrogla cur­vata, Pan­do­ravirus, Neuroptera

• Spiracular 14 Jun 2019 1:50 UTC

  10 points

  on: Spirac­u­lar’s Short­form Feed

  Out-of-con­text quote: I’d like for things I do to be ei­ther ig­nored or deeply-un­der­stood and I don’t know what to do with the in-be­tweens.

• Spiracular 14 Jun 2019 1:17 UTC

  7 points

  on: Spirac­u­lar’s Short­form Feed

  After see­ing a par­tic­u­larly overt form of moral­ity-of-prox­im­ity ar­gued (poorly) in a book...

  Some­thing in­ter­est­ing is go­ing on in my head in form­ing a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of what the best steel­man of moral­ity-of-prox­im­ity looks like? The stan­dard forms are ob­vi­ously su­per-bro­ken (there’s a lot of good rea­sons why EA par­tially builds it­self as a strong re­ac­tion against that; a lot of us cringe at “lo­cal is bet­ter” char­ity speak un­less it gets tied into “ca­pac­ity build­ing”). But I’m notic­ing that if I squint, the in­tu­ition bears a trace of similar­ity to my at­ti­tude on “What if we’re part of an “all pos­si­ble wor­lds” mul­ti­verse, in which the best and worst and ev­ery in-be­tween hap­pens, and where on a mul­ti­ver­sal scale… any­thing you do doesn’t mat­ter, be­cause de­ter­minis­ti­cally all spaces of pos­si­bil­ity will be in­evitably filled.”

  Ob­vi­ously, the re­sponse is: “Then try to have a pos­i­tive in­fluence on the prox­i­mal. Try to have a pos­i­tive in­fluence on the things you can con­trol.” And sure, part of that comes from giv­ing some weight to the pos­si­bil­ity that the uni­verse is not wired that way, but it’s also just a very broadly-use­ful heuris­tic to adopt if you want to do use­ful things in the world. “Fo­cus on act­ing on the things you can con­trol” is gen­er­ally pretty sound ad­vice, and I think it forms a core part of the (Stoic?) con­cept of rat­ing your morals on the ba­sis of your per­sonal ac­tions and not the noisy en­vi­ron­men­tal feed­back you’re get­ting in re­ply. Which is… at least half-right, but runs the risk of dis­con­nect­ing you from the rest of the world too much.

  If we ac­tu­ally can have the largest pos­i­tive im­pact on the prox­i­mal, then ab­solutely help the prox­i­mal. This in­tu­ition just breaks down in a world where money is in­cred­ibly liquid and trans­portable and is worth dra­mat­i­cally more in value/​util­ity in differ­ent places.

  (Of course, an­other el­e­ment of that POV might cen­ter around a stronger sense that sys1 em­pa­thetic feel­ings are a ter­mi­nal good in-and-of-it­self, which is some­thing I can’t pos­si­bly agree with. I’ve seen more than enough of emo­tional con­ta­gion and epi­demics-of-stress for a life­time. Some em­pa­thy is use­ful and good, but too much sounds awful. Mov­ing on.)

  I guess there needs to be a dis­tinc­tion made be­tween “quan­tity of power” and “fi­nesse of power,” and while quan­tity clearly can be put to a lot more use if you’re will­ing to cross state (coun­try, con­ti­nent...) lines, fi­nesse at a dis­tance is still hard. And you need at least some of both (at this point) to make a last­ing pos­i­tive im­pact (convo for later: what those im­por­tant com­po­nents of fi­nesse are, which I think might trig­ger some in­ter­est­ing dis­agree­ments). Find­ing spe­cial­ists you trust to han­dle the fi­nesse (read: steer­ing) of large amounts of power is of­ten hard, and it’s even harder to judge for peo­ple who don’t have that fi­nesse them­selves.

  And “Fi­nesse of power” re: tech­ni­cal im­pact, re: so­cial im­pact, re: group em­pow­er­ment/​dis­em­pow­er­ment (whether by choice or de-facto), re: PR or sym­bol­ogy… they can be re­ally differ­ent skills.

• Spiracular 13 Jun 2019 22:07 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Spirac­u­lar’s Short­form Feed

  Good to know! I’m as­sum­ing that’s mostly an au­to­matic con­se­quence of ev­ery­thing be­ing a com­ment, but that also fits with what I’d want from this sort of thing.

• Spiracular 13 Jun 2019 21:56 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: habryka's comment on: Spirac­u­lar’s Short­form Feed

  Damn it, Oli. Keep your pop­u­lar­ity away from my very-fake pseu­do­pri­vacy :P

  (Tone al­most ex­actly half-se­ri­ous half-jok­ingly-sar­cas­tic?)

  ((It’s fine, but I’m a lit­tle stressed by it.))