I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
They thought they found in numbers, more than in fire, earth, or water, many resemblances to things which are and become; thus such and such an attribute of numbers is justice, another is soul and mind, another is opportunity, and so on; and again they saw in numbers the attributes and ratios of the musical scales. Since, then, all other things seemed in their whole nature to be assimilated to numbers, while numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of nature, they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.
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I'd probably lay 3:1 against either voice-interface-usable-on-a-crowded-train or non-touch input and non-visual output via a brain link becoming common (say, 1% of smartphone users) by end of 2027, or 1:1 against for end of 2029.
These do not seem like conservative estimates. For a technology like this I think a spread to almost everyone (with a smartphone) is pretty likely given a spread to 1% of users. At least, from a technological perspective (which seems to be what your comment is arguing from), spreading to 1% of users seems like the real hard part here.
For each of these, the answer about whether the rule is good depends on what margins we're talking about.
For example, lets take your first point, rules that "prohibit others from doing things that would harm me". One way in which you could be harmed is by someone selling a drug to you which has negative side-effects which out-weigh the positive side-effects. Therefore should we ban the selling of those drugs?
I think we shouldn't. Not only do people have a right to put whatever they want in their body which this infringes upon, but the cost of actually following this rule is much higher than the benefit of being able to not (as the seller, selling to many) worry about whether there's a 1% chance this particular customer regrets their purchase.
You may not agree with the sign of that particular example, however, generally speaking, there are costs to following rules, outside of poorly chosen rules or bad application of rules. If the benefit to your rule is less than the cost of following that rule, then no matter how well the rule is chosen or how benevolent the application, its a bad rule!
And note that as the number of rules grows, the cost of following all of them does too (sometimes super-linearly, as rules can interact), while the benefit of the marginal rule decreases. Therefore there's an optimal number of rules, and we should expect that on average adding a new rule is just bad[1].
I will also note that this point was made in the comment you were responding to
Second, rules are costly to follow: you need to pay attention and remember all relevant rules and calculate all ways they interact.
Assuming we in a rule-optimal society, I think few would argue we make too few rules in general. ↩︎
Seems false for LessWrong 1.0, I’ve read much of the comments on the old Eliezer posts, and they are far far worse than the present forum. I have less to say on early LessWrong 2.0.
I know you said you don’t have a strong view on the actual history, but the actual history does seem pretty central to your argument here. You are free to choose some other argument for your conclusion however.
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I don't disagree, but how do you know?