Similar to a game of The Sims the characters actions are chosen in advance.

A string of actions were your last action effects the next one and were actions are cancelled out and changed. 

Your next action is to prepare a meal. You walk to the kitchen to start preparing the meal when you open the fridge and notice you don't have any food. The action is now cancelled and replaced with "Go to the store to buy food". 

I'm not sure about this, but presenting it anyway for scrutiny.

I was thinking that it doesn't matter if a concept is undefined, or even cannot be defined, if hypothetically speaking said concept can exist without any ambiguity within it then it is still a tenable concept. The implications, if this is true, would be that it would knock down Quine's argument against the analytic-synthetic distinction.

Your thoughts, Lesswrong?

In Copenhagen the summer before last, I shared a taxi with a man who thought his chance of dying in an artificial intelligence-related accident was as high as that of heart disease or cancer. No surprise if he’d been the driver, perhaps (never tell a taxi driver that you’re a philosopher!), but this was a man who has spent his career with computers.

NYTimes

Nothing new for LW, but interesting to see some non-sci-fi public discussion of AI risk.

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz.html

Summary: Moldbug on the Aaron Schwartz affair.  Power is a very real thing with real consequences for activists, yet many people don't understand the nature of power in modern times.  People like Noam Chomsky get great fame doing bad epistomology about who has power, and as a result do great harm to idealistic nerds who don't read between the lines to selectively target their attacks at weak institutions (Exxon, Pentagon) instead of strong ones (State, academica incl. MIT).

Here he returns to a theme that is one of his real contributions to blogospheric political thought: that victory in political competitions provides Bayesian information about who has power and who doesn't.  If your worldview has the underdog somehow systematically beating the overdog, your epistemology is simply wrong - in the same way, and to the same extent, as a geocentrist who has to keep adding epicycles to account for anomalous observations.

The truth is that the weapons of "activism" are not weapons which the weak can use against the strong. They are weapons the strong can use against the weak. When the weak try to use them against the strong, the outcome is... well... suicidal.

Who was stronger - Dr. King, or Bull Connor? Well, we have a pretty good test for who was stronger. Who won? In the real story, overdogs win. Who had the full force of the world's strongest government on his side? Who had a small-town police force staffed with backward hicks? In the real story, overdogs win.

"Civil disobedience" is no more than a way for the overdog to say to the underdog: I am so strong that you cannot enforce your "laws" upon me. I am strong and might makes right - I give you the law, not you me. Don't think the losing party in this conflict didn't try its own "civil disobedience." And even its own "active measures." Which availed them - what? Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.

This means that activists like King, Schwartz, and Assange are only effective in bullying the weak, not standing up to the strong (despite conventional narratives that misassign strengths to institutions).  When such activists stop following the script, and naively use the same tactics to attack strong institutions, reality reasserts itself quite forcefully:

You know, when I read that Assange had his hands on a huge dump of DoD and State documents, I figured we would never see those cables. Sure enough, the first thing he released was some DoD material.

Why? Well, obviously, Assange knew the score. He knew that Arlington is weak and Georgetown is strong. He knew that he could tweak Arlington's nose all day long and party on it, making big friends in high society, and no one would even think about reaching out and touching him. Or so I thought.

In fact, my cynicism was unjustified. In fact, Assange turned out to be a true believer, not a canny schemer. He was not content to wield his sword against the usual devils of the Chomsky narrative. Oh no, the poor fscker believed that he was actually there to take on the actual powers that be. Who are actually, of course, unlike the cartoon villains... strong. If he didn't know that... he knows it now!

...But had Aaron Swartz plugged his laptop into the Exxon internal network and downloaded everything Beelzebub knows about fracking, he would be a live hero to this day. Why? Because no ambitious Federal prosecutor in the 21st century would see a route to career success through hounding some activist at Exxon's behest...

But when you take on a genuinely respected institution - whether State or MIT - your "civil disobedience" has all the prospects of George Wallace in the schoolhouse door.

Then he takes his beliefs seriously, and speaks actual truth to actual power. Well, ya know, power doesn't like that much.

Thagard (2012) contains a nicely compact passage on thought experiments:

Grisdale’s (2010) discussion of modern conceptions of water refutes a highly influential thought experiment that the meaning of water is largely a matter of reference to the world rather than mental representation. Putnam (1975) invited people to consider a planet, Twin Earth, that is a near duplicate of our own. The only difference is that on Twin Earth water is a more complicated substance XYZ rather than H2O. Water on Twin Earth is imagined to be indistinguishable from H2O, so people have the same mental representation of it. Nevertheless, according to Putnam, the meaning of the concept water on Twin Earth is different because it refers to XYZ rather than H2O. Putnam’s famous conclusion is that “meaning just ain’t in the head.”

The apparent conceivability of Twin Earth as identical to Earth except for the different constitution of water depends on ignorance of chemistry. As Grisdale (2010) documents, even a slight change in the chemical constitution of water produces dramatic changes in its effects. If normal hydrogen is replaced by different isotopes, deuterium or tritium, the water molecule markedly changes its chemical properties. Life would be impossible if H2O were replaced by heavy water, D2O or T2O; and compounds made of elements different from hydrogen and oxygen would be even more different in their properties. Hence Putnam’s thought experiment is scientifically incoherent: If water were not H2O, Twin Earth would not be at all like Earth. [See also Universal Fire. --Luke]

This incoherence should serve as a warning to philosophers who try to base theories on thought experiments, a practice I have criticized in relation to concepts of mind (Thagard, 2010a, ch. 2). Some philosophers have thought that the nonmaterial nature of consciousness is shown by their ability to imagine beings (zombies) who are physically just like people but who lack consciousness. It is entirely likely, however, that once the brain mechanisms that produce consciousness are better understood, it will become clear that zombies are as fanciful as Putnam’s XYZ. Just as imagining that water is XYZ is a sign only of ignorance of chemistry, imagining that consciousness is nonbiological may well turn out to reveal ignorance rather than some profound conceptual truth about the nature of mind. Of course, the hypothesis that consciousness is a brain process is not part of most people’s everyday concept of consciousness, but psychological concepts can progress just like ones in physics and chemistry. [See also the Zombies Sequence. --Luke]