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All of Jef Jelten's Comments + Replies

Ayn Rand’s model of “living money”; and an upside of burnout
Jef Jelten-40

I understand the mechanisms of your metaphor and while they are undeniable they are also, IMO overly simplistic and not helpful as it leaves out the most important element of willpower.

Just like freewill, willpower implies making a decision then using your "freewill" or willpower to act on it. Willpower, as with freewill, is meaningless without making a conscious and preferably well informed decision. 

Regardless of living or dead if you do not have reasonably accurate and somewhat complete info aka less wrong-ish its a crapshoot as to the outcome.&nbs... (read more)

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Gentleness and the artificial Other
Jef Jelten0-1

Most scary thing for me regarding AI is the simple fact that what constitutes modern human history is mostly lies repeated over and over, especially concentrated in the last 50+ years. With this in mind what exactly is AI being trained on and aligned to?

If it can't discern truth from lies we are phucked.

If it can discern truth from lies we are phucked.

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Cohabitive Games so Far
Jef Jelten-10

Competition is bad! Ooooh thats going to get some goats. Competition is only legitimate when there are true shortages of necessary things, in other words when times are in crisis. This does occur in nature obviously and we as humans have observed it.  A dog will indeed eat a dog but only in extreme conditions.  The problem is that we then optimized and structured civilization in favor of that behavior. 

Humans do not need that kind of motivation in order to do all of the wonderful things we are capable of. Competition elicits all of humanitie... (read more)

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4mako yass
Situations where people make conflicting plans tend to result in net harm for all as the plans collide and fail, and stupid things happen, instead of any of the plans. This doesn't require scarcity, it's orthogonal to it, you could have war without scarcity (WW2, the contest over Taiwan), or peace despite it (Witness a community in crisis, look around for cannibalism, you mostly wont see any of it), war just requires coordination failure, which often correlates with scarcity, as a society with no trust or rule of law will have difficulty gathering investment for large projects and growing wealth, and a society with great wealth will tend to have stronger information workers, journalists, accountants and legal systems. But the direct causal factor is not the wealth. I want to agree that conflict in that sense, the waste, is just always bad. But, we don't have to be idealistic about it. Sometimes we really do lack coordination infrastructure, in which case we have to accept that there's going to be conflict.
4Mitchell_Porter
This take on anti-imperialism is new to me. Is this your own interpretation of history, or did you get it from somewhere else?