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Peter_de_Blanc comments on The 5-Second Level - Less Wrong
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Agreed, although I don't know that I have any Asperger's. Here's a sample dialogue I actually had that would have gone better if I had been in touch with my inner moralizer. I didn't record it, so it's paraphrased from memory:
X: It's really important to me what happens to the species a billion years from now. (X actually made a much longer statement, with examples.)
Me: Well, you're human, so I don't think you can really have concerns about what happens a billion years from now because you can't imagine that period of time. It seems much more likely that you perceive talking about things a billion years off to be high status, and what you really want is the short term status gain from saying you have impressive plans. People aren't really that altruistic.
X: I hate it when people point out that there are two of me. The status-gaming part is separate from the long-term planning part.
Me: There are only one of you, and only one of me.
X: You're selfish! (This actually made more sense in the real conversation than it does here. This was some time ago and my memory has faded.)
Me: (I exited the conversation at this point. I don't remember how.)
I exited because I judged that X was making something he perceived to be an ad-hominem argument, and I knew that X knew that ad-hominem arguments were fallacious, and I couldn't deal with the apparent dishonesty. It is actually true that I am selfish, in the sense that I acknowledge no authority over my behavior higher than my own preferences. This isn't so bad given that some of my preferences are that other people get things they probably want. Today I'm not sure X was intending to make an ad-hominem argument. This alternative for my last step would have been better:
Me if I were in touch with my inner moralizer: Do I correctly understand that you are trying to make an ad-hominem argument?
If I had taken that path, I would either have clear evidence that X is dishonest, or a more interesting conversation if he wasn't; either way would have been better.
When I visualize myself taking the alternative I presently prefer, I also imagine myself stepping back so I would be just out of X's reach. I really don't like physical confrontation.
My original purpose here was give an example, but the point at the end is interesting: if you're going to denounce, there's a small chance that things might escalate, so you need to get clear on what you want to do if things escalate.
In what sense are you using the word imagine, and how hard have you tried to imagine a billion years?
I have a really poor intuition for time, so I"m the wrong person to ask.
I can imagine a thousand things as a 10x10x10 cube. I can imagine a million things as a 10x10x10 arrangements of 1K cubes. My visualization for a billion looks just like my visualization for a million, and a year seems like a long time to start with, so I can't imagine a billion years.
In order to have desires about something, you have to have a compelling internal representation of that something so you can have a desire about it.
X didn't say "I can too imagine a billion years!", so none of this pertains to my point.
Would it help to be more specific? Imagine a little cube of metal, 1mm wide. Imagine rolling it between your thumb and fingertip, bigger than a grain of sand, smaller than a peppercorn. Yes?
A one-litre bottle holds 1 million of those. (If your first thought was the packing ratio, your second thought should be to cut the corners off to make cuboctahedra.)
Now imagine a cubic metre. A typical desk has a height of around 0.75m, so if its top is a metre deep and 1.33 metres wide (quite a large desk), then there is 1 cubic metre of space between the desktop and the floor.
It takes 1 billion of those millimetre cubes to fill that volume.
Now find an Olympic-sized swimming pool and swim a few lengths in it. It takes 2.5 trillion of those cubes to fill it.
Fill it with fine sand of 0.1mm diameter, and you will have a few quadrillion grains.
A bigger problem I have with the original is where X says "It's really important to me what happens to the species a billion years from now." The species, a billion years from now? That sounds like a failure to comprehend just what a billion years is: the time that life has existed on Earth so far. I confidently predict that a billion years hence, not a single presently existing species, including us, will still exist in anything much like its present form, even imagining "business as usual" and leaving aside existential risks and singularities.
Excellent. I can visualize a billion now. Thank you.
First, I imagine a billion bits. That's maybe 15 minutes of high quality video, so it's pretty easy to imagine a billion bits. Then I imagine that each of those bits represents some proposition about a year - for example, whether or not humanity still exists. If you want to model a second proposition about each year, just add another billion bits.
Perhaps I don't understand your usage of the word 'imagine' because this example doesn't really help me 'imagine' them at all. Imagine their result (the high quality video) sure, but not the bits themselves.