37/M/Vegas. Dropped out of PhD in Computer Science in AI to go work for Google in LA for a few years. Then I worked for an online advertising startup for a few years. Then in 2016 I moved to Las Vegas to be a professional gambler.
Re computational unkindness, optimizing solely for what one person wants is easy. The complexity mostly arises from the picker trying to satisfy others' implicit preferences that they pretend not to have for the sake of being "flexible".
If our corrupted hardware can't be trusted to compute the consequences in a specific case, it probably also can't be trusted to compute the consequences of a general rule. All our derivations of deontological rules will be tilted in the direction of self interest or tribalism or unexamined disgust responses, not some galaxy-brained evaluation of the consequences of applying the rule to all possible situations.
Russell conjugation: I have deontological guardrails, you have customs, he has ancient taboos.
[edit: related Scott post which I endorse in spite of what I said above: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/]
Is there somewhere I can sign up to get notified of all the future St Louis meetups?
Suppose my decision algorithm is: I obtain the source code of Omega and run its prediction algorithm to determine what it predicts I will do, and then do the opposite of that.
This would be kind of like the proof that the halting problem is non-computable.
Certainly perfect prediction is impossible in some cases. Look at the halting problem in computer science.
This seems like a subset of point #7 here (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/20/writing-advice/)
7. Figure out who you’re trying to convince, then use the right tribal signals
I would define weirdness as emitting signals that the tribe recognizes as "other" but not "enemy". Emitting enough of the in-group signals may counteract that.
This is also reminiscent of John Gottman's empirical research on married couples where he found they were much more likely to split if the ratio of positive to negative interactions was less than 5 to 1.
Intertemporal arbitrage: buying corn when there's a bumper crop and selling it when there's a drought. How do we get rid of that? Either time travel or giving everyone lots of storage space and prior knowledge of all the goods he will ever need and their future abundance/scarcity time series.
Price signals arising from trade are also an incentive for consuming less of / producing more of scarce things to make them less scarce. Without the incentives of prices we'd need some other way of enforcing rationing of the finite capacity of the iron mines and communicating each person's marginal utility for iron. A borg hivemind.
Bellingham was also one of my top finalists for a personal move after I spent dozens of hours poring over statistics and maps. I used a tool on city-data.com that works like a stock screener for cities.
http://www.city-data.com/advanced/search.php#body?fips=0&csize=a&sc=10&sd=1&states=ALL&near=&nam_crit1=5195&b5195=20000&e5195=MAX&i5195=1&nam_crit2=1033&b1033=20000&e1033=MAX&i1033=1&nam_crit3=5900&b5900=MIN&e5900=5&i5900=1&nam_crit4=4048&b4048=MIN&e4048=45&i4048=1&nam_crit5=983&b983=1&e983=MAX&i983=1&nam_crit6=6532&b6532=1&e6532=MAX&i6532=1&nam_crit7=4036&b4036=MIN&e4036=502000&i4036=1&nam_crit8=507&b507=MIN&e507=85&i507=1&nam_crit9=5269&b5269=80&e5269=MAX&i5269=1&nam_crit10=6612&b6612=5&e6612=MAX&i6612=1&ps=20&p=0
I thought of a second potential problem in my layman armchair. Every cell that a virus infects, it kills (when the cell dies, the new viruses pop out). But what if the mRNA for a single protein just messes up a cell, without killing it? Possibly worse than just killing it.
prices are one of the best mechanisms for communicating the strength of preferences, but perhaps among friends you want a separate made-up currency with a more equal distribution. Daniel Reeves just bites the bullet and uses dollars though: https://messymatters.com/tv/