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Have you read Stross's /Permutation City/? A part of the book focuses on a thought experiment basically just like this one. (The place the book then takes the thought experiment is one I find weird and implausible, but the question is the interesting part.)
Actually, I would also recommend the essay "What Color are Your Bits?" as relevant: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php
It's about the assignment of properties like copyright to strings of bits, where the property is not a computable function (or indeed, a function at all) of the bits themselves, but still has meaning. I think it's an interesting perspective relevant to the question of assigning the property of consciousness to strings of bits, or physical processes computing on strings of bits. (I don't think it's an answer to the question of whether one can or should do so! It just brings up interesting points.)
Have you read Stross's /Permutation City/? A part of the book focuses on a thought experiment basically just like this one. (The place the book then takes the thought experiment is one I find weird and implausible, but the question is the interesting part.)
In response to
Review and Thoughts on Current Version of CFAR Workshop
I was at the same workshop as Gleb, and since I probably won't write it up myself, let me comment that I broadly agree with what he says about it here (and I also greatly enjoyed meeting him and everyone else there.)
Once upon a time ...
I'm curious. For those in their 20s, how were you taught to write essays?
Back in the Stone Age when I was growing up, we were taught to have a thesis statement early on so that our readers would know what we were going to be talking about. Here's where we're going with this. Is that entirely out of fashion?
My advisor in grad school expanded on this, to here's the issue, here's the thesis, here's how we're going to get there. A tidy map to let the reader know where we're going, to make it easier to know what to look for to follow along with the progress of the trip.
After a couple of paragraphs, I have no idea where this is going, Are we setting up some analogy to current events, or just setting up the context in which some thesis operates? I don't know, and I find I just don't care enough to continue reading.
I have often griped about essays here, suggesting that people start with an abstract. But here, I want to get get some information on how people are being taught to write. I'm often infuriated by journalists these days, as they write and write and write, and I wonder and I wonder and I wonder where the hell it's all going. Are people doing this on purpose?
Are they being taught to do this? If so, what are the specifics of the pedagogy involved?
I think the author is being obfuscatory in order to try to get the readers to have particular feelings about a specific real-life political conflict by analogy, without revealing too early what the actual conflict under discussion is. Unfortunately I don't think the author is really able to pull this off.
In response to
What is up with carbon dioxide and cognition? An offer
I like the idea of buying certificates of impact in this way... I wonder if you could scale this sort of thing with some kind of market platform.
Also, I've wondered about this multiple times before, but your post has finally nudged me into buying myself a CO2 monitor. The chance, even a modest chance, that I'm impairing my cognition, far outweighs the $130 and the possibility that I might have to open a window.
Could you describe how specifically the commenting works on medium.com? Because that seems to me like an important part where you just can't make everyone happy, because some people want mutually contradictory things (such as "to filter unwanted comments" vs "not to be filtered").
Commenting is actually one of the most interesting parts of Medium. It's surprisingly similar to a combination of your "removing debates" and "making attacking costly" -- you can reply to a post on Medium, and your reply is itself a post on your own Medium, with a metadata tag linking it to the post you're replying to. People will generally not see your reply underneath the original post, but they will see an 'other replies' button they can click which will reveal it. But people can recommend your post; if your post is recommended by (1) the original post author, (2) Medium staff (I think?), or (3) someone I follow, then I will automatically see it under the original post like a 'comment', above the 'show other replies' button.
In response to
Turning the Technical Crank
I think any proposal based on actual NNTP is probably doomed.
I think any proposal that asks the user to use a client that isn't The Web is doomed (but it looks like you are addressing that in 1.7.)
BUT, I think the notion of redesigning this system around something that is morally just like NNTP is a hugely interesting and not-totally-crazy one; AND even if you completely fail, I think there will be hugely valuable ideas in this sequence for people like me who also think about this kind of thing.
So please write this sequence!
I only heard about it after it was turned off, and spent my time since wondering if the news stories about the feature were the prank. (That is, that it didn't actually happen and Google merely announced they were turning off a feature that never existed... a kind of meta-prank as it were.)
I too was curious whether the complaints themselves were the joke, but I caught it early enough that I was able to verify the existence of the feature before it was pulled. It was definitely real. (And I tested its effect on outgoing email, it wasn't just a different-colored button.)
In response to
comment
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on
"3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism"
Really? I thought it was a self-identified term trying to smuggle in positive connotations, at least among the ingroup. I mean, justice is good, right, and who doesn't want to be a warrior... I don't really know any of those people so I defer, but I tend to prefer the overlapping (but not identical) term "Bigoteer" to strip "SJW"'s -positive- connotation, though the fact I have never wanted to keep a positive connotation exposes my bias.
In response to
comment
by
on
"3 Reasons It’s Irrational to Demand ‘Rationalism’ in Social Justice Activism"
Hmm, I'd previously thought it was always a pejorative term; now (after checking out Wikipedia) I have the impression that it was originally a positive self-identification, now primarily pejorative in modern usage. So I don't really know what to think about it it anymore.
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My feeling about this is that it's okay to have some degree of arbitrariness in our preferences - our preferences do not have a solid external foundation, they're human things, and like basically all human things will run into weird boundary cases when you let philosophers poke at them.
The good news is that I also think that hard-to-decide boundary cases are the ones that matter least, because I agree with others that moral uncertainty should behave a lot like regular uncertainty in this case (though I disagree with certain other applications of moral uncertainty).
The unfortunate thing about simulation as a 'hard to decide boundary case' is that, if we start doing it, we will probably do a LOT of it, which is a reason that its moral implications are likely to matter.