A lot of people gave very selflessly to build this warship so we can go out and battle the vikings, but the time has come to admit that hard work and hope are no substitute for actual knowledge and that we’ve made a really shitty ship. If we sail this ship against the vikings, we’ll be massacred immediately.
Oglaf webcomic, “Bilge”
(Oglaf is usually NSFW, so I’m not linking, even if this particular comic has nothing worse than coarse language.)
He senses in his gut that he did the right thing by showing up. As with all gut feelings, only time will tell whether this is pathetic self-delusion.
Neil Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
I hereby take part in the tradition and note that the tradition makes the following moot for relatively low levels of karma. You may round off your karma score if you want to be less identifiable. If your karma score is 15000 or above, you may put 15000 if you want to be less identifiable.
Income question: needs to specify individual or household. You may also want to specify sources, such as whether to include government aid, only include income from wages, or separate boxes for different categories of income.
I have done professional survey design and am available to assist with reviewing the phrasing of questions for surveys, here or on other projects.
Sorry? Of course he was sorry. People were always sorry. Sorry they had done what they had done, sorry they were doing what they were doing, sorry they were going to do what they were going to do; but they still did whatever it was. The sorrow never stopped them; it just made them feel better. And so the sorrow never stopped. …
Sorrow be damned, and all your plans. Fuck the faithful, fuck the committed, the dedicated, the true believers; fuck all the sure and certain people prepared to maim and kill whoever got in their way; fuck every cause that ended in murder and a child screaming.
Against a Dark Background by Iain M. Banks.
When buying $10 dust specks, do not get carried away and buy 3^^^3 of them. You won’t save any money that way.
During the conference I was staying with my sister in Syracuse. I brought the paper home and said to her, “I can’t understand these things that Lee and Yang are saying. It’s all so complicated.”
“No,” she said, “what you mean is not that you can’t understand it, but that you didn’t invent it. You didn’t figure it out your own way, from hearing the clue. What you should do is imagine you’re a student again, and take this paper upstairs, read every line of it, and check the equations. Then you’ll understand it very easily.”
I took her advice, and checked through the whole thing, and found it to be very obvious and simple. I had been afraid to read it thinking it, was too difficult.
Richard Feynman uses the try harder in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (“The 7 Percent Solution” in chapter 5)
Xander: Yep, vampires are real. A lot of ‘em live in Sunnydale. Willow ’ll fill you in.
Willow: I know it’s hard to accept at first.
Oz: Actually, it explains a lot.
One of the stronger examples of Bayesian updating in fiction, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 2, episode 13
Survey completed. Some of the questions are ambiguous.
“How many children do you have?” I find this question problematic each year. Biological offspring? Custodial children?
“What is your approximate annual income in US dollars?” Personal income? Household income?
“Gender Default” I wanted something like a Likert scale here. I would not say I would feel “wrong,” “creeped out,” or “freaked out” by switching genders, but I would even less say that I “identify with their birth gender only because they see no reason to go through the hassle and social stigma of transitioning,” which also seems qualitatively different than “a man who would be happy as either a man or a woman, but since they’re a man, they stay a man.” The question sets us a dichotomy that may not be so much false as a mild category error, sort of like “which one of you is the fork?”
Example of teachers not getting past Guessing the Teacher’s Password: debating teachers on the value of pi. Via Gelman.
On “having” children: should we be counting that as birth, raising, what you think of as “yours,” something else? I am thinking of sperm donors, surrogate mothers, children given up for adoption, and adoptive parents. If I am the biological parent of X offspring and raise Y of them, should I be reporting X or X-Y? And if I have step/adopted/foster children, +Z? “Raise” might be bad too, as there are people who have (biological or not) children they think of as “theirs” without custody or visitation.
The count might be fuzzier than intended. I would expect upward bias.
Economic: I cited Asimov on the previous post, so let’s stick with that. The Computer effectively runs a planned economy, using massive information-gathering and computing power to overcome the Hayekian knowledge problem. It really does know what is best. Everyone is free to listen to The Computer or not, but you know that your decision would be less efficient for accomplishing your goals. Such rebellions are useless, however, because The Computer’s prediction capabilities include whether or not you will take its advice, and it acts accordingly to make sure you get the best results anyway.
Sexual: With no need for biological reproduction, the sex drive is eliminated in favor of other interests. Some people continue to have sex; as a hobby, it has a public reputation somewhere between (the current view of) Civil War re-enactments and juggling.
Governmental: Initiation of violence is the chief rule. With powerful AI and ubiquitous nanotech, it is recognized that anyone can inflict his will upon a large area in a short time. Pre-emptive execution of possibly unfriendly biologicals is the major task of government.
[As the] percentage of the US population carrying cameras everywhere they go, every waking moment of their lives [has gone from “almost none” to “almost all,”] in the last few years, with very little fanfare, we’ve conclusively settled the questions of flying saucers, lake monsters, ghosts, and Bigfoot.
xkcd explains that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence .
We note that the king did not say one thing the jester did: ”… one, and only one, of the inscriptions is true.”
Also individual versus household. I went with individual.
My usual Block Universe analogy is a book. What time is it right now in Middle Earth? That question does not make much sense, although we coherently ask a reader, “What point are you at?” A page is a time-slice of that universe. We stand outside that universe the way a hypothetical observer stands outside time in a Block Universe.
I have trouble putting myself back in a frame of mind where some questions sound coherent. To take Eliezer’s haunted mine example, it is like asking, “But where do the gnomes go? If they have been emptied out of the mine, they must have gone somewhere. That’s simple conservation of matter.” There is a fundamental problem with the question.
Note that, once we start talking meta-universe, our words only have meaning as analogies. What does “outside time” really mean? Time is not the sort of thing that you get outside of, any more than you get to the left of it. You also do not get before time or outside space. There is no before without time, nor anywhere to be outside space. It would be like being faster than the number three. The syntax is right, but that is not how those words work.
Related engineer joke: “anybody can build a bridge that won’t collapse–but it takes a real engineer to build a bridge that just barely avoids collapse.”
Is there a point where Romeo and Juliet just seems less and less relevant, more and more a relic of some distant forgotten world?
Aren’t we already there for people who know the details rather than the outline? She was thirteen, they knew each other for less than a week, and he spent Act One mooning about a different girl. We no longer consider romantic difficulties between college boys and middle school girls to be the pinnacle of tragedy.
While we are arguing fictional evidence, I will take the third season of Buffy as its pinnacle, and that ends in triumph rather than tragedy (although again triumph over adversity). It might say more about your preferences if you think all the great works are tragedies; I know someone who thinks the sixth season of Buffy was the best, which is definitely a statement on her sense of life.
I should toss out my own. The first that occurs to me is that utopia could be far more constrained rather than far freer. Most of us seem to have a vision of a universe where you can do whatever you want so long as it harms no one else, a kind of Nozickian utopia of utopias. We will all move to Permutation City or build Prime Intellect, and then your only restraint is that you cannot restrain others.
If freedom is only instrumentally useful, rather than morally fundamental, there is no reason for this given sufficient powers of prediction and control. If Asimov’s supercomputers really can get around the Hayekian knowledge problem and perfect the economy, most arguments against command economies just went out the window. If I really do know better than you, with no epistemic issues, giving you more freedom is like letting a child play in traffic. If I can prove to you with mathematical certainty that decision X would make things worse, and you still choose X (objectively and by your preferences), we have just proved that you are not capable of handling freedom.
Telling someone where the mines are takes all the fun out of Minesweeper, but you should do it IRL if the town is on the edge of an old war zone. If someone has the walkthrough for my life, I may not consult it constantly, but I would like a pop-up confirmation window to appear whenever a decision will lead to “game over.” I would also like more save points.
-- Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson