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Khoth comments on Malthusian copying: mass death of unhappy life-loving uploads - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: Stuart_Armstrong 02 July 2012 04:37PM

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Comment author: gwern 02 July 2012 05:49:19PM 4 points [-]

Do companies that judge projects based on their Return on Investment over the next week outcompete companies that judge RoI over months or years?

Comment author: Khoth 02 July 2012 06:19:42PM 4 points [-]

Okay, it couldn't be taken to extreme levels, but I think some things (like arguing about uploads on LW) are sufficiently unlikely to improve workplace productivity that a dose of pain for doing it would be have positive expected survival value.

Comment author: gwern 02 July 2012 07:35:15PM *  6 points [-]

Far more efficiently dealt with by some simple cognitive prostheses like RescueTime... What's better, a few machine instructions matching a blocked Web address, or reengineering the architecture of the brain with, at a minimum, operant conditioning? This is actually a good example of how a crude ancestral mechanism like pain is not very adaptive or applicable to upload circumstances!

Comment author: Khoth 02 July 2012 09:22:02PM 1 point [-]

I'll concede that it's not terribly likely, then (with the pascal's wager caveat of it being very bad if it is true (and the anti-caveat that I don't think the upload scenario is stable anyway))

Comment author: Stuart_Armstrong 03 July 2012 09:27:28AM 0 points [-]

Selection, not reegineering. The question is whether there are people alive today with the best sets of characteristics to become these malthusian uploads.