gjm comments on Some reservations about Singer's child-in-the-pond argument - Less Wrong
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You may well be right about the real world. But in the fictional world of that SMBC comic, it seems to me that (miserable Superman + billions of people living in peace and prosperity) is plausibly an outcome that even Superman might prefer to (happy Superman + billions of people suffering war, poverty, disease, etc.).
In other words, I don't think your fictional example is good support for your thesis. Which is too bad, because (like much else at SMBC) it's a funny and thought-provoking comic.
Happy Superman + billions of people living in peace and prosperity is better than both. Some hypotheticals should be fought.
In the hypothetical world, Superman brings the whole planet to properity and then... he has a problem to find a job, and then he ends up working at the museum.
Why exactly is the person who saved the whole planet required to work? Did the humanity meanwhile evolve beyond the use of "thank you"? How about just asking some volunteers to donate 0.1% of their monthly income to Superman? If just one person in a few thousands agrees, Superman can retire happily.
The problem with the comix story is not just the extreme altruism, but that humanity appears unable to cooperate on Prisonners' Dilemma with the Superman. (I am not saying that's necessarily an incorrect description of the humanity. Just a sad one.)
I agree that some hypotheticals should be fought. But it seems to me that you're objecting to the basic premise of the strip and also trying to use it as fictional evidence.
In the fictional world depicted there, how do you get to happy Superman + happy billions?
In our actual world, how do you get to (if I'm understanding correctly the analogy you want to draw) comfortable first-worlders not needing to sacrifice anything + less malaria, starvation, etc., in the poorer parts of the world?
(From the other things you've said in this thread it seems like you're actually happy to get to comfortable first-worlders not needing to sacrifice anything + starvation and misery in the developing world. Fair enough; your values are what they are and I'm not going to try to change them. But then what does the hypothetical outcome (happy Superman + happy billions) have to do with anything?)
I am not using the strip as evidence of anything. The strip is just an illustration of a certain imaginary situation, and implicitly poses the question, is it a good one, or a bad one? An answer to which must consider what alternatives are on offer. The strip itself presents Superman's original behaviour, and his revised mission. But while reality has limits, hard choices, and problems without attainable solutions, fiction does not.
If Superman can fight crime retail, and then fight poverty wholesale, why should he not instead create the means of fighting poverty wholesale? Well, in canon, because he is not known for his brains. All he can really do is hit things very hard. No matter, after the "This began to wear on the hero" frame, introduce some genius superhero to point this out to Superman. The genius can do the inventing while Superman helps with the grunt work of building it, and humanity gets muon fusion engines decades earlier. My first fanfic.
In the same way as the author: by imagining it. The question is, why do you choose to imagine only the two scenarios in the strip, and reject the legitimacy of imagining the third?
Not happy, but I'm not willing to level the peaks of civilisation to fill in the troughs.
It's a result I think we would prefer to either of the others. In the real world, the question is how to get there. Distributing anti-malarial nets is all very well, but as SaidAchmiz has been saying, there needs to also be a larger strategy.
Then at least one of us is confused.
If you're just pointing to the strip as an illustration of something bad, then I disagree about its badness (even from hypothetical-Superman's vantage point): the strip shows Superman putting up with something pretty bad, but achieving something good for it, and I think even hypothetical-Superman would agree that the overall outcome is a good one.
Once you start arguing about what alternatives there might have been within the fiction, and saying "while reality has limits ... fiction does not", well, it seems like you're saying "It's bad to ask the fortunate few to sacrifice their interests for the sake of the miserable many, and we can see that because in my reimagining of the fictional world of this comic Superman does this but -- so I decree -- doesn't need to", and I don't see what you're gaining by appealing to the comic.
You're welcome to imagine anything you like. I just don't see the point of saying "So-and-so is bad; see, here's an imaginary situation a bit like so-and-so, in which I've decided what's possible and what isn't, and it turns out to be a bad situation".
Well, supposedly AMF thinks the nets are part of a larger strategy, and IIRC the Gates Foundation is trying to wipe out malaria. But, in any case, I don't see how to get from "there should be a larger strategy" to "it's OK for me not to do anything concrete". Of course it might be OK for you not to do anything concrete, but what I don't see is why the fact that there ought to be a larger strategy is any support for not doing anything concrete.
If I can imagine being at a switch deciding whether a train will kill five people or one, I can also imagine everyone getting off the train and the train derailing where it doesn't kill anybody. But that would defeat the whole point of imagining the train in the first place.
In the original comics, Superman invented things that were far ahead of even modern technology; including a series of robot duplicates that were visually indistinguishable from himself (not as powerful, of course, but he occasionally dressed one of them up as Clark Kent in order to maintain his disguise). In fact, super-intelligence was supposed to be one of his powers.
Exactly why he never produced a range of android butlers, or otherwise advanced technology, is a mystery to me. The only possible reason that I can think of is that the authors wanted to keep the world's visible technology levels more-or-less familiar to their readers.
He is certainly always able to think at the same speed he can do everything else. eg. Clark can write a Daily Prophet article in seconds, leaving the keyboard smoking. Even with only an IQ of, say 130 he should be comfortably ahead of any mere human for the purpose of achieving any particular intellectual task. Spending 10,000 subjective hours on something does wonders for achieving expert performance.
IIRC the ten thousand hours thing was ten thousand hours of tutored practice at a level appropriate to the learner. I can see Clark running into the limitations of other people's performance rather than his own as a bottleneck.
The important factor is that it is deliberate practice. Tutors are useful but not as necessary during the practice (this obviously varies depending on the degree and kind of feedback required).
In particular where the information is not yet contained in all the textbooks and internet resources currently in existence his learning will be much slower. He'll have to invent the science (or engineering) himself as he goes.
Daily Planet. Not perhaps the best name for a newspaper, as it appears to hint at Clark's otherworldly origins...
Anyhow, there is a limit to the speed at which even Superman can type; that limit being the keyboard. Your average keyboard is more than fast enough to keep up with a human typist, but not infinitely fast...
Assuming that the limit is in the PS/2 protocol (and not in the keyboard hardware - Clark may have quietly replaced the keyboard on his desktop with a high-speed variant that he'd built himself, but it still needs to talk to the computer using a known protocol); assuming that the keyboard's clock signal runs at 16.7kHz (at the top end of what the protocol allows) and continually outputs keypresses at 33 bits per key (11 bits per scancode; each key transmits one scancode when pressed, and two scancodes when released), Clark can type at a maximum of 506 characters per second; assuming an average of five characters plus a space per word, that works out to 84 words per second at most. A thousand-word article would therefore take close to 12 seconds to type up. Note that this is before dealing with punctuation or capital letters (the shift key also sends keycodes); moreover, double letters (like the cc in 'accept') will slow things down further; it'll take some slight time for the keyboard to register that the key is no longer being pressed, and Clark has to wait that long before hitting it again. (That actually suggests a test for a superpowered reporter; keep an eye open for a reporter whose articles avoid double letters).
Clark could certainly work faster than that if he were, say, engraving on a stone tablet, or using pencil and paper (I'm not sure about pens, the ink needs a little time to flow to the nib). Pencil and paper would be limited by how fast the pencil can move across the paper without igniting the paper...
My recently primed munchkin instinct can't help but notice that the analysis given doesn't remotely approach the limits specified here. Specifically, it tacitly assumes that Clark uses only the stock standard software that everyone else uses. In fact, it even assumes that Clark doesn't use even the most rudimentary macro or autocomplete features built in to standard wordpressors!
Assuming that at some point in his life Clark spent several minutes coding (at the limits you calculate) in anticipation of at some point in the future wishing to type fast all subsequent text input via the PS/2 protocol could occur a couple of orders of magnitude faster. Optimisations would include:
That wouldn't help; he can't then choose to send "keyup (a)" followed by "keyup (a)", there has to be a "key_down (a)" inbetween.
He could, of course, simply elect to have his personal keyboard ignore keyups and send only the shorter keydown codes, meaning that he has only 11 bits per character. Aside from that minor quibble, though, you make several excellent points.
If he's writing his own keyboard driver, he can take this even further, and have his keyboard (when in speed mode) deliver a different set of scancodes; he can pick out 32 keys and have each of them deliver a different 5-byte code (hitting any key outside of those 32 automatically turns off speed mode). In this manner, his encoding efficiency is limited only by processing power (his system will have to decrypt the input stream pretty quickly) and clock rate (assuming he doesn't mess with the desktop hardware, he'd probably still have to stick to 16.7kHz). Since modern processors run in the GHz range, I expect that the keyboard clock rate will be the limiting factor.
Unless he starts messing with his desktop's hardware, of course.
You seem to have read the text incorrectly. The passage you quote explicitly mentions sending both key_down and key_up and even uses the word 'alternating'. ie. All that is changing is a relatively minor mechanical detail of what kind of button each key behaves as. If necessary, imagine that each key behaves something like the button on a retractable ball point pen. First press down. Second press up. All that is done is removing the need to actually hold each key down with a finger while they are in the down state.
Samantha Carter used an entire computer lab when she was supercharged. Her limit was the key buffer if I recall. Depending on how computers have evolved the limiting factor could be the mechanics these days. If so, then it may be efficient to use several keyboards simultaneously.
Especially if he uses his (laser) eyes. Depending on his power level he could possibly write faster than the speed of light. If my past research is correct superman is the most powerful when inside a sun (a blue star is best but ours would be fine). So he could perhaps write the most quickly by positioning himself at the surface and the sun and engraving on the surface of say, Mars, or perhaps a moon of Jupiter. The limit of is output then be either the precision of his eyesight, how fast he can control the muscles that move said eyes or, if those capabilities are sufficiently excessive, how fast he can think.
Or he could simply bring a stone tablet with him, and make sure to remain far enough from the Sun so as not to melt his writing materials.
Using a distant tablet allows him to write faster than the speed of light without abandoning special relativity just by wiggling his eyes a little. If we assume he is one of the later incarnations who in fact can fly faster than the speed of light (and so has superluminal text output even while close to the writing material) then the advantage that remains for positioning himself at the surface of the sun is that his writing speed is limited by his laser energy output. His eyes are reputedly the most energy draining of his powers and so the amount of rock that he can burn away with his eyes is limited by his power input. Positioning himself at the surface of the sun gives him a couple of orders of magnitude more rock burning potential per second.
I dunno, how fast can a chisel carve stone before getting blunt, shattering the tablet, or something?
That's an interesting question. Assuming he doesn't use his own fingernails or his eyes and doesn't have access to materials from his own fictional universe what sort of chisel would he use? The best I know of is Tungsten Carbide. Fortunately if extensive use blunts the chisel he can just sharpen it again with his fingers or eyes. He would of course also cool it down after every sentence or two by breathing on it so that friction doesn't raise the temperature above 500°C where oxidisation starts. Or he could do his writing in a vacuum where he would only have to be concerned about the 2870°C melting point.
I'm not sure about limits when it comes to shattering the tablet (where the tablet could be, say, uluru). With a little practice, unbounded dexterity to rely on and no need to use something so crude as a hammer to apply force superman could get very close to the limits of the amount of shock the 'tablet' could absorb. While I have no formal training in superhuman engraving best practice I suspect the optimal technique would more closely resemble "extremely fast scratching" than "chiselling" per se. It seems highly probable that the limit that the rock could handle would be far faster than that of the PS/2 protocol. If it is necessary to reduce the concentrated stress on the rock superman can even fly back and forth like a dot matrix printer scratching a small parts of letters each time in the least damaging configuration.
This looks like a job for Randall!
What about a laser pen, built to withstand some substantial G-forces, writing on to a light-sensitive material, which is then photographed with a high speed camera?