Strange7

Karma: 2,134

Strange7 Nov 29, 2014, 9:42 PM
0 points
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Cryonics Questions

with democracy acting like a smokescreen for the voters—to give them an illusion of control, and to prevent them from revolting.

Voting prevents revolts in the same sense that a hydroelectric dam prevents floods. It’s not a matter of stopping up the revolutionary urge; in fact, any attempt to do so would be disastrous sooner or later. Instead it provides a safe, easy channel, and in the process, captures all the power of the movement before that flow can build up enough to cause damage.

The voters can have whatever they want, and the rest of the system does it’s best to stop them from wanting anything dangerous.

Strange7 Nov 29, 2014, 9:26 PM
3 points
in reply to: enoonsti’s comment on: Cryonics Questions
Let’s say you’re about to walk into a room that contains an unknown number of hostile people who possibly have guns. You don’t have much of a choice about which way you’re going, given that the “room” you’re currently in is really more of an active garbage compactor, but you do have a lot of military-grade garbage to pick through. Do you don some armor, grab a knife, or try to assemble a working gun of your own?

Trick question. Given adequate time and resources, you do all three. In this metaphor, the room outside is the future, enemy soldiers are the prospect of a dystopia or other bad end, AGI is the gun (least likely to succeed, given how many moving parts there are and the fact that you’re putting it together from garbage without real tools, but if you get it right it might solve a whole room full of problems very quickly), general sanity-improving stuff is the knife (a simple and reliable way to deal with whatever problem is right in front of you), and cryonics is the armor (so if one of those problems becomes lethally personal before you can solve it, you might be able to get back up and try again).

Strange7 Nov 29, 2014, 8:55 PM
0 points
in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2014
I’m saying the control systems on the plane constitute an artificial intelligence, advanced enough to do almost all the work of flying the plane but not general enough to do anything unrelated to flying the plane, and (at issue) not friendly enough to tell the pilots “this is likely just a little ice clog, in which case you don’t need to do anything” or, later in the catastrophe, “the single most important part of stall recovery is bringing the plane’s nose back down,” let alone override their panicky incompetence outright and act on such simple suggestions itself.

Strange7 Nov 29, 2014, 8:40 PM
0 points
in reply to: 27chaos’s comment on: Unemployment explanations

Suppose there’s only a limited demand for the goods produced and the other company uses technology that lets it fewer workers than the first one did.

“Labor-saving” innovations are simply increases in efficiency. If the new process allows more of the same (or equivalent) goods to be produced with less inputs, the price will drop and demand will increase. Significantly lower cost might even open up completely new applications for the goods.

Strange7 Nov 28, 2014, 4:34 PM
4 points
in reply to: dspeyer’s comment on: You have a set amount of “weirdness points”. Spend them wisely.
My objection is to the ‘set amount.’ What about the Bunny Ears Lawyer trope, where someone purchases additional weirdness points with a track record of outstanding competence?

Strange7 Nov 28, 2014, 4:23 PM
1 point
in reply to: 27chaos’s comment on: Unemployment explanations
The neighbor is possibly going to attack… why? Maybe because they want something you have, that they could seize by killing you? Such as your land? The term “lebensraum” comes to mind.

Communist ideology, likewise, exists to promote communist political policies, which have a number of major differences from capitalist (or, say, monarchist) policies when it comes to how natural resources should be exploited on industrial scales and how the products of that industry should be directed. Workers controlling the means of production, and so on.

As for falsifiability, it would be easy enough to imagine people going to war over a set of political issues (let’s say, calendar reform or the right to be openly homosexual) which have no clear implications one way or another for industry. It’s just, that doesn’t happen. Gulf War 2? Oil. American civil war? Cotton, by way of slavery. WWII? Germany and Japan trying to bootstrap. Sub-saharan bloodbaths? Closely correlated to droughts, with a time lag as food scarcity propagates through the system. Without an underlying resource conflict, no war occurs.

There’s always more to it than that, of course, because people are complicated. The first world war, for example, was a horrific morass of misplaced optimism and lost purposes, but when you look at the promises the leaders were making, it was always “no, really, we’ll be able to push ahead and capture valuable territory at low cost THIS time!” and the reparations afterward were transparently a transfer of resources from the losers to the winners.

Strange7 Nov 28, 2014, 5:54 AM
2 points
in reply to: ike’s comment on: The Hostile Arguer
I’m not saying that someone making the “understand when you’re older” argument is being dishonest. They might not even be incorrect. It’s just that, if that’s the best case they can come up with, even after thinking it over, you’re probably better off making your decision on some basis other than their opinion.

Strange7 Nov 28, 2014, 3:59 AM
8 points
in reply to: 27chaos’s comment on: The Hostile Arguer
It’s not that there aren’t any people whose unsupported assertion is more trustworthy than an explicit, persuasive-sounding argument for the opposite side, though certainly individuals of such discernment and integrity are rare. The issue is that any person so reliable would also necessarily have enough underlying intelligence to be able to, in any situation not involving implausibly extreme levels of time pressure, construct a better (or at least more contextually specific) argument than “you’ll understand when you’re older.” The only plausible explanation for being so vague is if they not only don’t want to tell you, but are further trying not to provide enough keywords for you to look up the real reason yourself.

Strange7 Nov 28, 2014, 12:57 AM
0 points
in reply to: 27chaos’s comment on: Unemployment explanations
Superior competitors don’t tend to cause widespread unemployment, though. People just go work for the company that’s on the rise.

As for uncertainty about a coming war… he’s saying that it all comes back to natural resources, access to land, and sure enough that tends to be what wars are about.

Strange7 Nov 28, 2014, 12:45 AM
3 points
in reply to: JoachimSchipper’s comment on: Unemployment explanations
Homeownership makes employees less willing to relocate, but also more tolerant of short-term decreases in the demand for their skills, since they can postpone maintenance on a house (or perform it inefficiently themselves with the surplus time) more safely than they can miss rent payments to a landlord.

Strange7 Nov 28, 2014, 12:05 AM
4 points
on: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale
“Haha, no, of course I don’t believe in monkeys transforming into humans! That’d never work. I just think they diverged from a common ancestor, many hundreds of thousands of years ago. Surely you’re aware of the differences between, say, sunni and shia islam, despite both believing that all the same prophets said all the same things, and splitting only a few hundred years back? To say nothing of the other Abrahamic religions.

Think of a living organism as being like a city, with cells like individual households, each keeping their own copy of DNA scripture in the nucleus. When that scripture gets transcribed incorrectly, or reinterpreted, the change can potentially alter any detail about how the larger city works. The cumulative effect of changing no more than one detail every few years, and recombination to found new colonies which then make their own changes, eventually results in different tribes that seem to have nothing in common.”

Strange7 Nov 27, 2014, 11:25 PM
3 points
in reply to: Thomas’s comment on: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale

Nobody believes that....

I cannot recall any instance of a claim in that format turning out to be correct.

Strange7 Nov 27, 2014, 11:21 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: vizikahn’s comment on: Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale
Parrots can talk; a parrot named Alex even accidentally learned how to spell out a word for emphasis when the listener didn’t seem to be paying attention. Pre-curse, this “snake” wasn’t crawling around on the ground. Maybe it was just a slightly cleverer species of parrot.

Strange7 Nov 6, 2014, 4:47 AM
−6 points
in reply to: Weedlayer’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2014

died from UFAI

How sure are you about that? Everyone on Air France flight 447 died as a direct result of insufficiently-friendly AI. Patient zero for ebola in the US was discharged from the emergency room with some painkillers and antibiotics because software looking through his medical records failed to recognize, and call the triage nurse’s attention to, obvious risk factors.

Strange7 Nov 3, 2014, 7:33 PM
0 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Is Sunk Cost Fallacy a Fallacy?
If there was some non-negligible probability that the study was bad, RationalWiki would, given their dislike for chiropractics, have seized upon that and discussed it explicitly, would they not?

Strange7 Nov 3, 2014, 1:41 PM
39 points
in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Rationality Quotes November 2014

Marriage to Kim Kardashian is not contagious.

As far as we know! Perhaps it simply has a long incubation period, and transitive polyamory will be legally recognized some time in the 2020s.

Strange7 Nov 3, 2014, 1:30 PM
0 points
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: Is Sunk Cost Fallacy a Fallacy?
It’s only a No True Scotsman if you can point to an actual citizen of Scotland who doesn’t meet the ‘true Scotsman’ standard.

You are conflating two claims here. One is that chiropractic is more expensive than conventional treatments for lower back pain, and the other is that chiropractic is less effective than conventional treatments for lower back pain. What support do you have for the latter claim?

Strange7 Nov 2, 2014, 7:07 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: A discussion of heroic responsibility

You just borrow more.

And/or authorize the police to steal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asset_forfeiture

Strange7 Nov 2, 2014, 5:11 PM
0 points
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Is Sunk Cost Fallacy a Fallacy?

You haven’t made an argument that indirect funding is the best way to go

On this point we are in agreement. I’m not making any assertions about what the absolute best way is to fund research.

and you’ve made baseless claims.

Please be more specific.

There’s nothing to respond to: the burden of proof is on anyone who claims that bizarrely indirect mechanisms through flawed actors

All humans are flawed. Were you perhaps under the impression that research grant applications get approved or denied by a gleaming crystalline logic-engine handed down to us by the Precursors?

Here is the ‘bizarrely indirect’ mechanism by which I am claiming industrial engineering motivates basic research. First, somebody approaches some engineers with a set of requirements that, at a glance, to someone familiar with the current state of the art, seems impossible or at least unreasonably difficult. Money is piled up, made available to the engineers conditional on them solving the problem, until they grudgingly admit that it might be possible after all.

The problem is broken down into smaller pieces: for example, to put a man on the moon, we need some machinery to keep him alive, and a big rocket to get him and the machinery back to Earth, and an even bigger rocket to send the man and the machinery and the return rocket out there in the first place. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation puts some heavy constraints on the design in terms of mass ratios, so minimizing the mass of the life-support machinery is important.

To minimize life-support mass while fulfilling the original requirement of actually keeping the man alive, the engineers need to understand what exactly the man might otherwise die of. No previous studies on the subject have been done, so they take a batch of laboratory-grade hamsters, pay someone to expose the hamsters to cosmic radiation in a systematic and controlled way, and carefully observe how sick or dead the hamsters become as a result. Basic research, in other words, but focused on a specific goal.

would NASA ever under any circumstances admit this?

They seem to be capable of acknowledging errors, yes. Are you?

“It turns out what we did in Apollo was probably the worst way we could have handled it operationally,” says Kriss Kennedy, project leader for architecture, habitability and integration at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, US.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11326

Strange7 Nov 1, 2014, 12:00 PM
0 points
in reply to: Lumifer’s comment on: Is Sunk Cost Fallacy a Fallacy?
‘Breakthroughs and basic science’ seem to be running in to diminishing returns lately. As a policy matter, I think we (human civilization) should focus more on applying what we already know about the basics, to do what we’re already doing more efficiently.