But also note that while the past may be fixed, your knowledge of the past is probabilistic. I assume there is evidence you could encounter that would convince you that Putin ordering airstrikes in Syria didn’t actually happen.
Steven_Bukal
Karma: 372
I take notes on my phone. I think some big tradeoffs compared to a paper notebook are less ease of writing, more convenience, less physical space taken up, and an end result that is easier to back up and work with in many ways.
Is human mind space countably finite? Just bring us all back please, I’ll be in there somewhere.
I don’t think there’s a precise threshold, but when I use the phrase “change the world”, I’m pretty confident that my interlocutor is thinking of people like Steve Jobs and companies like Apple and not thinking of people like me who don’t have our own wikipedia articles and companies like the ones I work for that don’t have names many would recognize and aren’t credited with inventing/popularizing important product categories that millions of people now use every day.
People who “change the world” make big political, technological, or scientific changes and bring them into the lives of many people.
I am a recent graduate of the University of Toronto, where we’ve seen that talks on campus that are viewed as opposing or questioning feminism will have their advertisements torn down and mobs organized by the student union will show up to harass and physically block attendees and take other disruptive actions like pulling fire alarms. I expect this would generalize to suppression of other forms of un-PC speech and thinking.
That said, the administration at UofT seems to respond to these incidents more reasonably than the UCLA administration in the article (i.e. they didn’t thoughtlessly capitulate), and my experience from taking courses across science, social science, and humanities faculties is that the atmosphere in general is definitely not extreme to the level of fire alarm pulling. I would guess that the extreme elements are mostly local to a small number of particular academic subject areas like women’s studies, but that this minority has significant power to influence what is acceptable speech and thought.
I used to be creeped out by house centipedes, but I decided to get along with them after reading that they are generally harmless to humans and useful to have around because they kill all sorts of other household pests.
I think just remembering that they are a good thing and thinking of them as being on my team was helpful. I also gave cool names to the ones living in my basement (e.g. Zeus, Odin, Xerxes) and talked to them e.g. “Hi, centipedes. Keep up the good work, but please do try to stay away from me during the day, and remember our deal: you can live here, but my species has an ingrained fear of you guys, so if you drop down onto me from the ceiling or something I’m probably going to instinctively smash you.”
My worry in that case would be present conditions bleeding into the memory and evaluation of those earlier pings. For example, I’d expect that when you’re hungry your relative ranking of past ping moments is going to change to more heavily weigh moments when you were eating.
Your school might have useful resources. If there is a career center, go there and see what kind of resources and help are available. There could be a student internship program, student job boards, career fairs, etc. Professors sometimes have work opportunities as well (they might announce these, or you may have to ask).
I’ve read that the CEO of Levi’s recommends washing jeans very infrequently.
Won’t they smell? I have a pretty clean white-collar lifestyle, but I’m concerned about wearing mine even once or twice between machine washing. Is it considered socially acceptable to re-wear jeans?
Did the survey. Thank you once again, Yvain.
Did the survey. Thanks, Yvain.
Instrumental stupidity is the art of winning at Pinkie Pie’s utility function.
Looks like a very useful list. One comment: I found the example in 2(a) a bit complicated and very difficult to parse.
Took the whole survey. My preferred political label of (Radical) Centrist survived all explicit radio buttons.
The phrasing I used there is indefensible, but the general idea I’m trying to get at is that many people acquire tons of things which in theory increase their power but in practise don’t because they are never on hand when needed. Added to this are the tons of things many people acquire whose uselessness goes unnoticed because of a general failure to criticize potential acquisitions for power increasing ability at all.
My default position towards things is hate. I hate stuff. It gets dusty, it has to be managed, it takes up space. A room with lots of stuff in it is cognitively difficult for the brain to process; having lots of stuff around actually drains your mental energy.
http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html
I generally dislike owning things that I can’t physically carry with me at all times (because “if you don’t have something with you, owning it probably hasn’t made you more powerful”). Consequently, the majority of what I own I carry with me. The only real exceptions are clothes and books, and I launched a project this week to replace the latter with digital versions which is moving at a decent rate of ten shelves a day.
Aren’t comics like that the source of the cached thought we’re trying to improve on here?
Celestia here doesn’t seem to be having fun.
I think this is the big one. Sure, Celestia says that death is bad. She also describes her life as prolonged suffering and says that she envies mortals because immortals have purpose but don’t actually live. The opinions and example of Celestia aren’t necessarily to be taken as the theme of the work itself, but I can understand why people might be confused.
Arrives late to the party
Really great story, iceman. Some comments:
*Running the story through a beta group of non-LW bronies would definitely be a good idea to catch which ideas may need more explanation.
*I really like how it’s repeatedly show that when you interact with a super-intelligence, even if it’s just free conversation, the state of mind you leave in is probably going to be the state of mind it wants you to leave in. As others have said, this could be driven home even stronger by showing CelestAI strongly tailoring her interaction to different humans. Maybe even have her directly contradict herself in the information she uses to persuade people to upload.
*Related to the above, I can imagine a non-LW reader getting to chapter 5 and forever after wondering why Lars or anyone else never tries to shut Celestia down. I’m not sure how obvious an intuition it is that by the time you notice a super-intelligence doing things that make you want to stop it, it’s probably already far too late to stop it. In this case I assumed Celestia would have made sure that she is already invincible by the standards of human technology before launching any plan that’s going to antagonize people, but an unsophisticated reader might not get that.
This may just be me, but I’d prefer a bit more closure on the cosmic scale story. What *is Celestia’s plan against running out of matter? Slow the clock speed of her servers over time? Bust open the physics textbooks and hope for a useful paradigm shift?
Anyway, very good stuff.
Any chance you’d release this under a non-copyleft license?