djcb comments on The Popularization Bias - Less Wrong

21 Post author: Wei_Dai 17 July 2009 03:43PM

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Comment author: djcb 17 July 2009 09:45:20PM 0 points [-]

+1; indeed, this is interesting from an scifi-itch-scratching viewpoint, but I guess we have the next 10^6 years to worry about the details.

Anyway, I like LW for bringing such things to my attention (thanks Wei_Dai!), but apart from being interesting, this seems not like an idea that need mass-popularization, or?

Comment author: Wei_Dai 18 July 2009 07:03:18AM 2 points [-]

You ask a fair question, I think. Here are some potential short-term implications of black-hole negentropy:

  • The far future will most likely not be dominated by an everyone-for-himself type of scenario (like Robin Hanson's Burning the Cosmic Commons. Knowing that, and possibly having a chance to see the far future for yourself, does that affect your short-term goals?
  • There is less need to adopt drastic policies to prevent the Burning the Cosmic Commons scenario.
  • The universe is capable of supporting much more life than we might intuit, even after seeing calculations like the one in Nick Bostrom's Astronomical Waste, which fail to take into account quadratic negentropy. What are the ethical implications of that? I'm not sure yet, but I'd be surprised if there weren't any.
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