A very specific type of dumbass.
sxae(Sean)
Karma: 64
[Question] Is a Self-Iterating AGI Vulnerable to Thompson-style Trojans?
Why Democracy?
The Price Of Space Is Friendship
- [deleted]
How do we build organisations that want to build safe AI?
I imagine something similar would be true of space; in times of war, some nations would be unable to access their colonies
Maybe I’m vastly underestimating how self-sufficient these colonies will be, but my impression from current plans for permanent habitation is that they will depend on shipments from Earth for basic supplies for quite some time. Strong claim held weakly, someone please prove me wrong on that. But I imagine it’s going to be a heck of a lot of extra straw on an already overloaded camel’s back.
Kessler syndrome isn’t a huge issue when you’re just shooting off somewhere else and not spending a lot of time in LEO. But I think not having the ability to have infrastructure like satellites, fuel dumps, stations, skyhooks, or whatever the heck else you feel like putting there is going to be a problem and again make the whole operation a lot less efficient.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply Daniel!
Cheaper spaceships are definitely cheaper to replace if some oppositional nation-state blows them up, but there’s only so many times you can play that game before you end up with the Kessler syndrome issues.
If you’re referring to the vertical launch and takeoff of SpaceX shuttles, that really only affects the last moments of reentry. A SpaceX shuttle still does the vast majority of its braking in the atmosphere.
Launching in weird orbits is absolutely a strategy that nation-states could use to mitigate these risks, but in a field where your margins are already white-knuckle tight, such an arbitrary restraint is at best a huge inefficiency on our ability to progress space exploration.
The $/kg price point is the driving metric of how quickly we can expand our space colonization, so increasing that by an order of magnitude because we can’t just get along seems suboptimal.
Ships cannot simply be allocated to arbitrary launch manuevers—fuel tanks need to be made bigger, designs adjusted, missions planned.
Hohmann transfers, as mentioned, carry with them an arbitrary amount of LEO over an arbitrary stretch of airspace. Restricting your space of possible Hohmann transfers to only “safe” ones will possibly reduce your launch windows to an unmanageable level.
At a minimum they also impose harms on the people who you convinced not to eat meat (since you are assuming that eating meat was a benefit to you that you wanted to pay for). And of course they make further vegetarian outreach harder .
The primary argument for convincing someone to not eat meat is that the long term costs outweigh the short term benefits, so I’m not sure that you can categorically state that convincing someone to stop eating meat is causing them harm. Sure, they don’t get to eat a steak, but the odds of their grandchildren not dying from catastrophic climate collapse go up.
If we expected increased outreach and prosletyization from vegetarians to uniformly make further outreach harder, would we expect to see the rapid and exponential growth of vegetarianism (as it seems to be)?
[Question] What does the reaction to NFTs tell us about how people evaluate ecological damage?
that this is just the kind of thing that happens when retailers are foolishly prevented (by public opinion, if not by law) from charging the true market price.
Retailer console base prices are set by the manufacturer. A first-party retailer is not allowed to charge more than the RRP as part of their agreement.
Perhaps an important economic point here is that consoles are generally sold below-cost. Console manufacturers lose money on every product they sell from hardware costs. This is because consoles make their money on games, where the margins are much fatter.
The issue here is that the manufacturers and retailers are working in a commodity mindset, whereas the market for these items has shifted away from a commodity and into a luxury due to the high demand compared to supply.
In general though, I’m optimistic about scalpers collapsing under increasing liqudity. Sony poured a lot of resources into automating their manufacturing pipeline and has been churning them out as fast as they can since day 1, with no sign of slowing. The number of consoles in the world is increasing at a much faster rate than the number of people who want consoles.
Thanks for your thoughts ACrackedPot 🙂
Sounds like a stressful model to think about! Maybe I’m just too much of a pacifist for that mindset. But I agree that friction is absolutely a critical part of democracy. A big part of that is giving people a non-violent way to settle disputes and come to consensus over limited resources.
First, it labels a society that’s in civil war where decisions are made by the sword as democratic provided everyone has equal power and is equally effected.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply ChristianKl :)
Such a broken-down society doesn’t have a system of governance, and we explicitly say that this is a property of a system of governance. A power vacuum within which a system would normally sit is distinguishably different to a functioning state. So, it seems like we would fully expect this definition to fail here at no fault of its own.
Secondly, it ignores delegation of power. By the nature of delegation of power it means that the person who’s the recipiant of delegated power has more power then the people who delegate their power.
Yes, this is in support of radical and direct democracy, not the watered-down versions we see today which depend far too heavily on delegation. It is a very intentional ignoring of delegation, because delegation is directly counter to maximizing this property. I do propose Liquid Democracy as a just solution for sometimes temporarily delegating power in the “Counter-Arguments: The Average Punter” section, because it is sometimes necessary for decisions where the average voter isn’t proficient.
Delegation of power not only happens through elections. If many people read an article by an investigative reporter, that gives the investigative reporter power which in turn means that a single man can create change when something isn’t working. Free speech is a central part of the Western notion of democracy because it allow such interactions to happen.
We are not merely describing democracy as “elections”, as I try to outline in the opening “What Is Democracy”. You will notice that I describe agency as not merely the agency of an individual within a political system, but general agency of action, which I believe encompasses your views on free speech.
But that isn’t what I want, and it’s not what I’m saying here. At no point do I make the claim that the values represented by the safety team are or should be static. I understand the point you’re making, I’ve even written about it pretty extensively here, but as far as I can see it’s a much more general ethical issue than the domain of this essay. It applies just as readily to literally any organisation as it does to the theoretical organisations proposed here.
Specifically what values wider society holds and how they evolve those values is not the purview of this essay. Whatever those values are—within a reasonable domain of the possibility space—the orthogonality of the production team and those values remains. E.g if your society is single-mindedly focused on religious fervour, your societal values are still orthogonal to any good production team, so it doesn’t really affect the point I’m making all that much.
I’m not 100% sure if your intention is to equate democratic governance with this lottery hypothetical, but I’m not quite sure the two can be compared. As to how important or nominally good I might perceive value drift as, well I think it’s rather like how important the drift of your car is—rather dependent on the road.
The tyranny of the rocket equation means that we’re going to really struggle to make it worth it. For the same reason that we can’t just make fuel tanks bigger, it is very inefficient to send fuel out from the same gravity well as you want to refuel from—orders of magnitude.
The thing to remember when we talk about “kg of fuel per kg of cargo” is that the vast majority of that fuel is burned in the lower atmosphere. The majority of the work of shooting a rocket off to space is just getting it moving. So if you want to ship enough rocket fuel up to form a fuel dump with something like hydrogen rocket fuel, then you need to expend vastly more fuel than you end up storing.
Hello Gerald! For sure. To be honest the Kessler syndrome was an afterthought and I may be overestimating its impact. I think the far more relevant danger is active measures against a launching or landing craft. Things like fuel dumps (you are totally right in that it doesn’t make sense to take fuel from Earth up into LEO, I was more thinking about bringing fuel from some other much-lower-energy gravity well like the moon) would probably be better placed in Lagrange points.
Mary aquires the new, novel experience of believing that she has seen the color red, when she previously held the belief that she only had perfect, but non-subjective knowledge. Qualia does not necessarily need to be new information as this attempts to demonstrate, it just is whatever is different about your mind when you actually experience a thing.
That’s a great point! There is that possibility, but do we need to make that assumption? I’m not sure.
Mary would be able to tell us if “qualia did not differ in ways known only to the person who had them”, even if she might not be able to describe to us exactly how. She’d be able to say “that was different”, even if the precise words to describe how it was different escaped her, and that true/false response is enough to draw some meaningful conclusion about the existance of something, even if it doesn’t tell you anything about the nature of that thing. And if it’s completely imperceptable to Mary, then it can’t be qualia, as qualia is by definition about subjective perception.
Is this true? e.g. Gallup shows the fraction of US vegetarians at 6% in 2000 and 5% 2020 (link), so if there is exponential growth it seems like either their numbers are wrong or the growth is very slow.
Well the nature of exponential growth includes a long tail, but yes, it does appear that over the past few decades there has been substantial growth in many areas, with the UK reporting 150,000 vegans in 2006 compared to 600,000 vegans in 2018. Additionally, the vegan food industry “$14.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $31.4 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 10.5% from 2019 to 2026.” That’s a really high growth rate—I doubt that there is no other sector of the food industry expanding as rapdily as that, though I can’t say for sure.
It seems implausible to me that the individual benefits from reducing climate change are comparable to the costs or benefits of diet change over the short term. Even if everyone changing their diet decreased extinction risk by 1% (I think that’s implausible, but you could try to tell a story about non-extinction environmental impacts being crazy large), being vegetarian would reduce your grandchildren’s probability of death by well under < 1/billion which is completely negligible.
Culture is a thing, and the decisisons that you express shape the social valuations of the people around you. A single person going against a carnivorous tide will indeed change nothing, but a single person choosing to engage in a wider, growing movement can have substantial knock-on effects. I think you may be underestimating the impact of modern animal agriculture here, I would say that the difference between a timelines that drastically reduces its meat intake would be measureably better environmentally—primarily because it would drastically reduce the land requirements of feeding the world, which would in turn mean we could rewild large parts of it for a lot cheaper. No drastic change means that the freefall collapse of the biosphere continues unabated, whereas change could plausibly improve the situation like I describe.
This idea seems like it has several large issues:
It disproportionately targets people who are poor and directly ties how much risk you can take on to how much disposable income you are able to leverage. This doesn’t seem particularly just, especially considering these are the people who have been most disadvantaged by coronavirus so far.
Big taxes like this can be used in a myriad of ways, but whether they ever are used in those ways is another question entirely. That’s just not typically how modern governments handle tax revenue. And are the things you list really not done simply because we don’t have the money? I don’t think so.
You’re placing a big inefficiency on industries already operating at fairly small margins in dire straits. The live music industry does not need any more weight on its back, it’s already broken at this point. Many pubs and restaurants are only barely hanging on. If your intention is to drive the final nail into the coffin of many of these industries, this is a good way to do so.
People are strongly incentivised under this scheme to obfuscate, minimise or completely hide their social gatherings. When you force people away from things like nightclubs, pubs, bars, or festivals you just shift that activity into a gray area. People still act and organise to fulfill their social needs, and they’re always going to be better at getting around any monitoring you build than you will be at building it.