Great job on the fic EY. If you were to promise to write Ch 123, I would let you out of the box.

I believe that society should be organized so that people work collectively in a society focused on its own survival and power. My views are extremely collectivist, in that, the relationship between the society and its people would be a lot like the relationship between a body and its cells.

For me, I stopped craving sugar after I stopped eating so much of it. Why did I stop eating it? Well, that's because I think I changed my identity from "Someone who eats whatever they want when they're hungry" to "someone who only eats what he has decided is optimal" (and sugary foods are often not in that category).

we should ask "Given the current policies, what circumstances are best?".

I guess it's to be born in a powerful family of oligarchs, preferably ones that are not abusive to their children, as an intelligent non-asperger person who can learn how to play the game.

We ought to be studying the sociopolitical system and taking advantage of its patterns and loopholes.

Uhm... any useful reincarnation tips?

Actually, I like your idea. I am just not sure how big change could we make "merely" by studying the system and applying the advantages. More than zero, certainly, but we could still be kinda disappointed with the result, because we expected more. (Also, it may require us to sacrifice some other values.)

But taking advantage of the system seems to me like an experimental verification that your model is correct.

This reminds me: many years ago, one of my friends expressed a strong political opinion that in capitalism you don't need any skills or work to get rich; you just have to start with some money and then it automatically makes more money. Thus people born in rich families get more rich, and others don't have a chance. I said that to make your money make more money, you still need some plan, and you need to execute it, which not literally eveyone can do. My friend objected that you just pay other people to do the work and the thinking for you, and that's all.

At that moment I started playing with numbers, and showed my friend that he could get enough money to start a company and pay two or three people for one year... which according to his simplistic model should be enough to start the accelerating money spiral (he just needs to make one of them a manager, who would design plans and make the other person or two realize them; and then my friend can pay them fixed salary and take all the profit). I told him that if he really believes that, I will get him the money, in return for a part of the profit. My friend quickly updated his theory, and said that this is not enough, and you need 100 × more money to get to the level where money starts making other money automatically. (Of course, no justification for the number 100 was provided.)

What we do think we know is that politics is a great way to bring out the irrationality in people.

Yes, and the irrationality comes in before the discussion even has a chance. In these kinds of discussions, almost without fail, people take their circumstances as a given, and then ask what set of policies would be optimal. The (mistaken) assumption being that their circumstances are immutable while policy is entirely malleable and controllable. The opposite is true. That is, we have the most control over our own situation, and the least control over public policy (effectively none).

Inevitably, people in different circumstances will have different preferences over policy outcomes, and so the discussion degenerates into people bickering about which set of policies is "best", i.e. everyone tells everyone else that their preferences are wrong (and then they try to rationalize their preferences in order to "prove" that they are the correct ones, and then arguments become soldiers and so on and so forth).

Virtually every single "debate" in politics is dissolved once one questions the assumption above. If we have almost no control over public policy, then is it even worth considering our preferences over them? To illustrate, a question like "should the government raise taxes?" is about as relevant as "should Jupiter be painted blue?" if I can do nothing to effect either case.

I propose that we turn politics on its side. Instead of asking "Given my circumstances, what policies are best?" we should ask "Given the current policies, what circumstances are best?". That is we should be engaging in is sociopolitical Munchkinism. We ought to be studying the sociopolitical system and taking advantage of its patterns and loopholes. The best political ideas are those that most improve the circumstances of a given person. There are many objective measures one could use to evaluate them. That would be the only way to have a rational discussion of politics.

I don't think this is anything really new. The principle of general covariance in GR says that the laws of physics should remain invariant under a diffeomorphism. Since coordinate transformations are diffeomorphisms, and since time is relative, the equations of GR do not depend on time. Indeed, I think the search for a background independent theory of quantum gravity is exactly the approach taken by Loop Quantum Gravity.

Is it possible that this has something to do with how rounded the shapes are? I noticed that the ratio of cusps to rounded edges (a circle counting for two) is 1:0, 2:0, 3:1, 2:0 for the male digits and 0:2, 1:1, 0:3, 0:4, 0:3 for the female digits. Though obviously this can change with typeface it often remains more or less true.

If you can go through that chain of reasoning, so can the other person - therefore, it doesn't seem entirely ridiculous to me to bid $2 to the other person's $1 in the hope that they won't want to enter a bidding war and you'll win $18.

Let's say there's an X% chance you expect the other person to surrender and let you have the $20 for $2 rather than enter the bidding war, and let's also say you don't intend to ever make a bid after your first bid of $2. Then expected value is (X)(20) - (1-X)(2) = 20x - (2 - 2X) = 22X - 2. If X is greater than 1/11 or about 9%, then it's profitable to enter the auction. So unless you're greater than 91% sure that the other person will start a bidding war instead of sacrificing their $1 and letting you have the money, it's positive expected value to enter the auction.

The Yudkowskian response is to point out that when cognitivists use the term 'good', their intuitive notion of 'good' is captured by a massive logical function that can't be expressed in simple statements

This is the weakest part of the argument. Why should anybody believe that there is a super complicated function that determines what is 'good'? What are the alternative hypotheses?

I can think of a much simpler hypothesis that explains all of the relevant facts. Our brains come equipped with a simple function that maps "is" statements to "ought" statements. Thus, we can reason about "ought" statements just like we do with "is" statements.

The special thing about this function is that there is nothing special about it at all. It is absolutely trivial. Any "ought" statement can potentially be inferred from any "is" statement. Therefore, "ought" statements can never be conditioned by evidence. This explains not only why there is lots of disagreement among people about what is "good" and that our beliefs about what constitutes "good" will be very complicated, but also that there will be no way to resolve these disagreements.

Yeah, smooth muscle and heart muscle, different kinds of tissues from skeletal muscle. I doubt the body has trouble differentiating them.