If you do, I’d like to hear about how to find good targets for optimisation. Time and pain are obvious indicators, but what about invisible stuff? This is the domain of the everyday, and so much of the everyday is filtered out by our brains (eg. I was in my forties before it occurred to me that I could take some of the fridge’s shelving out to make it more useful for me).
Stuart Anderson
Karma: 205
avoid notes from fetlife events
If you think that facebook (et al.) doesn’t know where you are, and all about your perversions, then I have some bad news for you.
Not only do facebook have a tracking infrastructure that is probably as good as the NSA’s, they have a ‘helpful’ user base (read: informants) that will take photos, write detailed posts, etc. and then label them with your identity. Believe me when I say that you only need people that know you and DGAF or don’t know about privacy issues that will vomit everything they ever knew or suspected about you directly into facebook’s information funnel.
Opsec is difficult. Privacy is dead, and it died years ago, it’s just that most people don’t realise it (and possibly because documented history is time compressed. The decade where people gave up their privacy will be reduced to a line or two in the retelling).
As a side note, I wonder about the effectiveness of information pollution on facebook’s gathering and algorithms. Will shoving enough bullshit into their inputs mess up their results?
Water stone
People with a meaningful relationship with knives are already religiously obsessing over how to sharpen them (joke: if you are ever lost in the forest just sharpen a knife because someone will appear and tell you how you’re doing it wrong). For everyone else, there’s the ikea knife sharpener that does a good enough job for people that don’t give a damn.
On the topic of kitchen utensils, I like the tupperware can opener (https://www.tupperware.com/can-opener/).
You can buy bulk box cutters (https://www.amazon.com/Handy-Cutter-Open-Close-Assorted/dp/B00006IC0L) and razor blades for them. Then put them everywhere you ever might want to cut something.
EMT shears are the best scissors for anything that doesn’t want to be cut.
Spudgers make cleaning things like mice easier.
You don’t need arthritis to buy a reaching claw (or any other disability aid that makes something less work).
Shoelaces are mostly bullshit and can be replaced with any one of the brands of elastic laces. Insoles make your shoes last longer.
I spend silly amounts of money on computer monitors. They obsolete slower than any other component and I stare at them all day. Sometimes throwing money at the problem is the best answer.
Anything that you can automate or use a labour saving machine for you should do unless there’s a very good reason not to. Banking and bill paying are the best target for anyone that hasn’t already done it.
If you want to try paperless I can recommend the Boox Note. Basically an android tablet with an epaper screen and a wacom digitiser and pen. Not perfect by a long shot, but the first solution I’ve used that is good enough to actually work. Couple it with automated file syncing to move PDFs around.
Most prepping is low hanging fruit when something goes wrong (covid, anyone?). You don’t have to go crazy but having the basics will save your ass (or at least your sanity).
You get everything, good and bad, when merging countries. You don’t get the privilege of firing difficult citizens, especially when it comes to taking two bureaucracies and turning them into one. Equalising standards can be incredibly expensive and onerous.
The US already gets everything it wants from Mexico so there’s no reason to take on all the things it doesn’t want for literally zero gain. If Mexico became a state then America loses a big chunk of its slave trade and gains a bunch of third world problems (including the cartels).
Why don’t countries divide more often?
Clearly if one can join others for benefit, then the inverse must also be true. Why don’t countries divest themselves of problems (of all stripes)?
If we look at the States it is clear that certain areas have major animus, fundamental political disagreements, etc. In the case of the States it is even more a question for me because it is a union—the states have significant autonomy under the banner of the federal government. You can go your own way in part, in a reversible way, alongside others doing the same.
If you encourage bad behaviour, then bad behaviour is what you get. That being said, pragmatism demands ethical compromises. You do what you need to do and then just add the supplier to your kill list.
how much of that is it reasonable to talk about in public?
Officially, none. There’s no gain to be had in letting predators know that you’re an easy mark.
I think there is virtue in off the record conversation. People talk, and that’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. You share the information you have because that’s how you build relationships.
They didn’t turn the frogs gay, they turned them *trans*: https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/
Amphibians are basically the semi-permeable canaries in the coal mine when it comes to environmental toxins and pollutants. If it damages frogs that means it damages everything, just slower.
There is little or no interest in finding out why this is happening.
Welcome to any issue that affects men.
What is filling the hole left by religion?
That’s an easy question to answer: generally more religion.
If you don’t believe there’s a modern non-theistic authoritarian religion in the Anglosphere, simply post some wrong-think on twitter and watch the witch hunters come for you and your family. Try something like “Trans women aren’t women” or “Men and women aren’t equal”.
Other responses to an absence of religion are social fracture in the absence of a unifying force, hedonism as sedation or distraction, nihilism, and a few people that look for answers in study and labour (ie. when you live in a world where you must make your own meaning, you must make your own meaning. Turns out, that’s work and most people are lazy shits).
Without religion, how will people know right from wrong?
By what gets their asses kicked. This is nothing more than cause and effect.
… everybody already has an innate understanding of right and wrong.
Everybody has an innate understanding of altruism versus self interest. Everyone figures out when to cooperate and when to defect. Everyone tries to get away with something they shouldn’t be doing. Some people even learn from their mistakes.
These are heinous wrongs that are obvious even to children. Obviously, lying is bad. Obviously, hurting others is bad. So to knock down religion for reiterating obvious morals comes across as straw-manning.
Is now a good time to talk about how they eat Albinos and rape children to ‘cure’ AIDS in Africa? Obvious isn’t obvious, it’s just familiarity with your own environment’s rules.
Consider single mothers in the West. We have mountains of concrete research that single mothers are literally the worst thing you can do to children short of abandoning them to be raised by wolves. The obvious solution would be to either stop women having a choice about dissolving relationships with offspring, or to remove children from their custody when they do. So you tell me why we aren’t doing the obvious thing here?
There’s no concrete right or wrong, there’s what’s permitted and hopefully a discourse that advances the discussion in a positive direction. Slavery was once permissible in the West, now it isn’t. What was once right is now wrong. Parts of Africa never evolved their ethics to that point, and neither have parts of the Islamic ummah. Slavery is perfectly okay in those cultures. That doesn’t make slavery right for them, it just makes them less civilised than us. In the case of the Islamic ummah they are disgusted by Western sexual degeneracy, and if we are being objective there’s probably some merit to that position.
All that being said, I’m no cultural relativist. I’m very much on team Western liberal democracy simply because life’s a competition and everyone else can get fucked.
Another tactic that atheists use is to mock low-level norms
Who doesn’t mock their rivals?
I’m an atheist and I think the appropriate stance is to simply not care. As long as the chicken isn’t harmed then why should I give a fuck that you’re waiving it around your head? It’s not my business, and I’ve got better things to do than get into some pointless shit fight over how your unprovable beliefs differ from mine.
Frankly, I find theology interesting on the grounds it is part of history, law, ethics, art, etc. I don’t believe but I’m not about to ignore such foundational texts because of that.
high-level norms, such as “Don’t steal,” “Don’t lie,” etc., have been rightly deemed redundant by modern, civil society; and, low-level norms, such as dietary restrictions, seem redundant thanks to modern inventions, such as refrigerators.
Stealing is clearly socially and legally censured, and lying can be too depending on context. I don’t understand what you’re saying.
As for dietary restrictions, we’re all stuck at home because some Godless Chinese couldn’t go five minutes without eating bats and every other diseased animal they could get their hands on. As I said, I’m an atheist, but when the Old Testament tells you not to eat bats that seems like solid advice to me. Still, the Chinese have yet to master basic hygiene and sanitation, so perhaps forbidden meats are farther down the list of issues than things like that are.
Look at any teenager, and you can tell they “innately” don’t care for old people.
What do they respect? The role of teenager is a Western invention, and part of that is that we let them be assholes.
What should be the rule be about adultery?
Don’t do it. That was easy.
All actions have consequences. I don’t have any problem with people being sluts, I just have a problem with irresponsible people offloading their crap onto everyone else and expecting to get away with it. Be a slut with my blessing, but don’t lie about it or subject minors to the consequences of your lifestyle and expect me to be okay with that.
… it was meant to illustrate a broader point, that the decentralized bookshelf of ideas has disrupted the old technology of centralized holy books.
What killed off the Church was the printing press. What killed off traditional paradigms of relationships was the contraceptive pill. What’s killing off the past is an omnipresent communications infrastructure combined with filter bubbles and dark patterns.
The web is a self adapting dopamine dispenser and we’re all well and truly hooked at this point. The internet is a Skinner box that figures out what stimuli hooks you the most and then offers you it in abundance. Society isn’t being molded by our choices so much as it is being molded by our biology intersecting with the technology. This is lizard brain stuff. We have never lived in a safer and more prosperous time than at any point in history, and we are surrounded with wonders and opportunities that our forebears could barely have conceived of, yet people are ungrateful and miserable. We have walked into an unconscious optimisation of technology for our negativity bias. Consciously choosing to walk out of that is going to be a goddamn nightmare for almost everyone (consider how you felt the last time your internet went down. We now live in a world without silence or boredom and when that’s forced onto people they behave exactly like withdrawing addicts).
I find no good reason to pay attention to these type of twits.
Ignoring that the numbers don’t add up, what makes them believe that anyone has an onus to care about them, let alone fund their (purported) concerns?
They’re always happy to spend other people’s money yet never lift a finger to spend their own fixing the problem either. If they don’t care enough to spend their own money helping then why should others have to do it for them at their demand?
There isn’t even a point in throwing all the pragmatic issues at them if they’ve failed to clear even the most fundamental hurdles.
Cars and trucks are the obvious example, they’re about to start driving themselves professionally.
Drones. Lots of medical equipment. Mobile phones are arguably ‘immobots’.
I suppose it all boils down to what ‘robot’ means. Does it have to move? Does it have to do all its thinking itself? How general does it function have to be?
I would say it is obvious that there are more important things than money, but I’m broke, so that’s how useful that advice is in an investment discussion.
Ethics have a price tag. Sometimes that price is in dollars. That can be mentally ‘quantified’ by the individual fairly easily: all you have to do is ask yourself how much profit do you need from investing in China to look the other way on all the evil? Everyone has their price, myself included.
I always appreciate someone that replies, as speech is always the answer to speech.
Re 1: I mentioned quants for a reason. Smart people can outperform the market, but they have to be incredibly smart (basically psychic wizards as far as I can tell), and most people aren’t.
Insider trading works, so that doesn’t need to be justified.
Buy and hold works. ETFs work. That general principle is going to be a lot better than stock picks and active trading for the vast majority of people.
Re 2: This is a valid criticism, however my reply to that would be that Investing in China is probably still a bad risk because of other parties opinions. Government is the 800lb gorilla that is always sticking its nose in on moral grounds, it’s not like there isn’t precedent for people losing money because the government got into a snit over something.
Re 3: Distilling and brewing is legal in my country (so’s sex work for that matter). The costs involved are far lower than investing in the stock market. And most importantly, I’m talking about what I am considering and not advising anyone else what they should be doing.
My situation is probably very different to other peoples: I am low income, mentally ill, and apart from money that people have died and left me it is reasonable to assume that I’ll spend the rest of my life in poverty. I don’t have high expectations for what little money I have, I’d just like to stay off the street. So if selling ‘drugs’ (which is exactly what alcohol is) could help me in that, and if it turns out to be something that pragmatically works for me, then that’s what I’ll do. The set up cost is low, and it doesn’t seem like brain surgery, but if it doesn’t work for me then I’ll just sell the equipment off and move onto my next hare brained scheme.
Should people buy specific stocks instead of ETFs? Which ones?
Unless you have expert knowledge of a domain or insider trading information then the answer to that question is probably no. We know that barring quants (survivor bias?), ETFs perform better than manual stock picks.
Everything I’ve seen in investing indicates that for the average person it is better to buy stocks, probably ETFs, and simply forget (ie. don’t look at their pricing every five minutes) about them. Long term growth is what matters, but people get spooked by short term volatility.
How should we get Exposure to China? Do we want/need China tech exposure?
China is an authoritarian communism regime on a good day, so giving them your money is literally worse than burning it.
Pragmatically, they’re running death camps and locking horns with more than half the planet right now. This is off the back of them killing many of our people with their dirty unhygienic ways creating covid, and their duplicitous and mendacious government deliberately allowing it to spread to the world. Hong Kong and it’s financial and business markets being shafted by Chinese megalomania isn’t exactly helpful either. Giving your money to that level of evil and stupid is both immoral and foolish.
If you are both immoral and foolish it is also worth bearing in mind in the event of escalation either China, your own government, or both are likely to void your investment. When a government can legally steal from you, they will.
How do we get exposure to areas besides the USA and China? Do we need to?
Stock markets, and probably, unless you believe that there’s nobody capable of doing solid work outside the US and China.
I don’t know the market, but I’d be really surprised if Israel wasn’t putting money into AI. If there’s anyone that knows a weapon technology when they see one, it’s them.
Should we invest in land if we expect AI progress?
I have considered this in light of the increase in automation. It’s pretty obvious that the skill floor on employment will continue to rise as it has. We don’t need AI to have widespread human obsolescence. We’ve already seen what job losses from economic collapses do to people and whole countries, so it’s worth considering what it would be like to live in tough times.
Land isn’t ever going to be obsolete, nor is there likely to suddenly be more of it. If that is so then it is safe to assume that scarcity can be profited from. That being said, land, unless it is of low value, tends to be horrendously expensive. You need a lot of money to get into this game.
The thing I’m considering as a hedge against difficult times is sin. Specifically, brewing and distilling. This is effectively legal drug dealing, and people will pay for drugs before they’ll pay for food, so it’s not like selling will be difficult. Where I am the laws and permits aren’t prohibitive, and as long as you don’t sell too much the taxation regime isn’t too horrible.
Should we directly invest in hardware (Nvidia has already gone up a lot)?
As Intel stock crashing due to getting lapped by AMD presently shows, winning and losing, even with a solid record, happens a lot in the processor sector. GPUs are nothing more than specialised processors. This is a high volatility area, so unless you’re comfortable with that kind of risk I’d steer clear of it.
Also, lots of things that don’t look like robot bodies are robot bodies.
I have considered this for my mental illness. When nothing works you’re willing to try anything. Be very careful in that state of mind, for obvious reasons (ie. doing this in the middle of covid is an exceptionally stupid idea. If you need an ICU bed right now you might not get it. Depending on where you are specialists may have been redeployed to covid wards).
I get that you are concerned, but treating for an illness that you do not have out of pure fear of it seems reckless to me. Worms are not a joke and things can go wrong (these things can end up in your brain. Remember how I mentioned an ICU bed above?). There’s a reason we use medicine in preference to parasites. If I were you I’d put myself right with my fear first. I’m not telling you not to try this, I’m telling you that you have to make this choice with your mind unencumbered by fear.
Pragmatically, getting worms isn’t fun based on all the accounts I’ve read. Getting and staying infected can be a PITA. Complications can occur. You will be infectious to others. That being said, every account I’ve read has been from someone that was fucked otherwise, so if it was a choice of this or die it’s not a particularly difficult choice.
On the arthritis front, something to consider is bee venom. That’s something that isn’t difficult to obtain and test for efficacy. Serious heat and cold (eg. saunas, ice therapy, etc.) may also be of value, again, not difficult to test. Depending on the nature of the problem and how much cash you have there are some therapies involving injecting stem cells and your own filtered blood products that appear to work (at least for injuries, which is where I know them from).
It sounds obvious, but clean up your diet. Poor food choice is probably the most day to day pro-inflammatory decision people make. Then fix all the other stuff people hate to deal with: stress, exercise, sleep, meditation, stop smoking, drinking, drugs, etc. Whatever beneficial or detrimental choices you make add up.
We all want the magic bullet that makes everything better. Sometimes those bullets do exist, but most of the time they don’t. Manage your expectations accordingly. Take smart risks. Take detailed notes, and make sure someone knows where they are. You are *literally* performing a medical experiment on yourself—act like it.
Value and incentive are complicated. The point of automation from the view of most business will be getting rid of low skill work (or more accurately, getting rid of low skill workers). I never want to be paying a person for anything a machine can do, because the machine will always beat them on cost (and skill is secondary to that. Good enough is good enough for most use cases). Wages and other attendant expenses for employees are typically the greatest expense of any business.
Just because a system is more autonomous doesn’t necessarily mean it is less a part of us. Consider clocks, they require no intervention from us but drive a great deal of our behaviour. Anything that can act as a sense can be entirely passive and still be incorporated into our cognition. Your phone makes a noise and you respond accordingly, it is external and autonomous and it is your internal state that changes in response to it.
In-silico isn’t physically limited to organic brain capacity, but the amount of distributed processing to make even the most trivial applications work is staggering. Assuming we have to simulate a human brain’s complexity to get equivalent results then that’s going to be a massive computational complexity problem for a long time.
I don’t think alignment can be hardcoded. If we get AGI then that’s likely to be a product of evolving said AGI. If that’s the case then all we can do is create an environment in which beneficial alignment makes competitive sense then evolve our prototypes within it. Human good only exists because it works in the real world, and it worked in our ancestors before our species ever existed. The same can be said of human evil. If you give a being, human or synthetic, choice and power then you must also accept by extension you are giving it the means to err or wilfully do ill. There’s literally no way around that.
If we want AGI to learn to be good then at the very least we’re going to have to give it scope to make mistakes. There will obviously be costs incurred in that.
Automation. The more tasks we get machines to do on their own the more likely that AGI will be possible.
That being said, I don’t have a lot of confidence in true AGI happening any time soon. I think highly skilled intelligent agents are more likely, and humans with the same as prosthetic enhancements to their own abilities (much like mobile phones functioning as an exocortex at present).
I think the above can form an interesting scenario in which our brains end up as the lizard brains of AGI. Just as our primitive brain guides our actions and our complex brain figures out how to action those desires (and justify them after the fact) then there’s no reason AGI couldn’t end up in the same position at some point. There’s no reason artificial needs to mean wholly synthetic or in-silico.
Dremelling may not be worse than nothing, but it is certainly so suboptimal that it will feel thus.
The issue here is that there is more than one way to skin a cat, and nobody bothered to investigate that. A jigsaw isn’t a particularly special piece of equipment, and even if it was a particularly fancy jigsaw I’m pretty sure it still wouldn’t be a unicorn. So the obvious conclusion is that there’s probably one or more nearby. In that case, what does one have to do to find one, and arrange the use thereof?
There are always going to be chokepoints, barriers, rules, etc. in life. The trick is to learn how to get around them in novel ways. There’s nothing wrong with following the established path when it works, but you need to veer off it when it doesn’t (and if you think inactivity bothers people, just see how badly the react when you start unapologetically doing things the wrong way).
The solution to this problem is the same as for boredom: having something else to do while you wait.
If the appearance of meaningful activity is all that is required then as long as said pantomime doesn’t create setbacks itself then it is good enough. Anyone that has carried a clipboard around an office knows this.
Learning to trick your own brain is an important life skill. If your brain is saying “Must be busy” then give it work, because it won’t care what the work is, nor can it tell the difference between meaningful work and busywork. You give your dumb brain what it wants and it will stop bugging you.
I don’t know about drone subs (I’d imagine they’d be similar to torpedos) but the flying kind of drone can obviously be shot out of the air, and there’s quite a bit of research going on in directed energy weapons to cook them.