I suppose you might be right for some people. For me, the fact that repeating infinite decimal expansions are rational is deeply deeply ingrained. Since your post is essentially how to square your feelings with what turns out to be mathematically true, you have a lot of room for disagreement as there is no contradiction in different people feeling different ways about the same facts.
For me the most fun thing about 0.9999.... is that 1/9 = .11111... and therefore 9x1/9 = 9x.111111..... and this last expression obviously = .99999...
You should also do a s...
The OP states:
A very good question is "what kinds of objects are these, anyway?" Since we have an infinite decimal they can't be rational numbers.
This is just wrong. A rational number is a number that can be written as a fraction of two integers. Lots of infinite decimals are rational numbers. 1/3 = .3333333..., 1/9 = .1111111.... 1/7 = .142857142857142857... etc.
Clearly we can differentiate between different-location-same-time and different-location-different-time. Two things in different-location-same-time are different things. Two things different-location-different-time may be same thing or may be different thing depending on the path through time. Your mathematical style of abstraction in thinking about identity will only be useful at explaining the real world if it is matched to real world processes, and does not ignore important real world insights.
if we adopt idea that consciousness could be different without any physical difference between the copies, we adopt the idea of p-zombies and reject physicalism that is modern version of materialism. It almost the same as to say that immaterial soul exist. It is very strong statement.
Not relevant to the problem. If you create a copy of me, the copy is not identical, if for no other reason than it occupies a different location than I do. I agree that if it occupied the same location that I do, atom for atom and quark for quark, that could lead to the c...
1) I do not understand why our experience of identical twins does not play into most discussions of my copy being "the same person as me." We know that twins do not share the same consciousness (unless Occam's razor is wrong and they are all lying.) We know from that that if we made a copy without destroying the original that the copy and the original would not share a consciousness. So why isn't at least the possibiliy (I would estimate overwhelming likelihood) that a copy is a different consciousness than the original, and that destroying th...
My first thoughts reading your post are 1) You start WAY TOO LATE IN THE GAME. You are essentially talking about altruism as a conscious choice which means you are well into the higher mammals.
Virtually every sexually reproducing creature devotes resources to reproduction that could have been conserved for individual survival. As you move up in complexity, you have animals feeding their young and performing other services for them. As would be expected with all evolved cooperation, the energy and cost you expend raising your young produces a more surv...
I may not understand the question's point, because as I read it the answer is a very obvious "Yes." We determined Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations from observations of our world. So the planets in orbit around the sun, the moon around the earth, and an apple falling to the ground all lead to gravitation. The attraction between wires carrying current in the same direction (magnetic), the functioning of transformers (change in magnetic field produces electric field) and radio and light all fit together to give Maxwell's equations.
So yes, ...
That Artificial Intelligence is going to do a lot of the same things that Natural Intelligence does.
Taboo "faith", what do you mean specifically by that term?
Good idea. I mean that EVERYBODY, rationalist atheist and christian alike, starts with an axiom or assumption.
In the case of rationalist atheists (or at least come such as myself) the axioms started with are things like 1) truth is inferred with semi=quantifiable confidence from evidence supporting hypotheses, 2) explanations like "god did it" or "alpha did it" or "a benevolent force of the universe did it" are disallowed. I think some people are willin...
This comment is in reply to some ideas in the comments below.
In my opinion, my rationality is as faith-based as is a religious person's religious belief.
Among my highest values is "being right" in the sense of being able to instrumentally effect or predict the world. I want to be able to communicate across long distances, to turn combustible fuel into safe transportation, to correctly predict what an interstellar probe will find and to be able to build an interstellar probe that will work. Looking at the world, I see much more success in en...
I'm not sure which is correct. Not that familiar with utilitarianist nuts and bolts.
As with so many things, if there is more than one way to interpret something there is generally not too much to be gained by interpreting so that there is an error when there is a way to interpret it that makes sense. Clearly if a new charity sets up that takes twice the cost to provide the same benefit, and people switch donations from the cheaper charity to the more expensive one, utility produced has been decreased compared to the counterfactual where the new more ex...
I think that if a charity had negative utility, that would imply that burning a sum of money would be preferable to donating that money to that charity.
If there are two charities, one which feeds homeless population for $3/day and a 2nd which feeds same population same food for $6/day, AND people tend to give some amount of money to one charity or the other, but not both, then it seems pretty reasonable to describe the utility of the more expensive charity as negative. It is not that it would be better to burn my contribution, but rather that I am gett...
'no pig' > 'happy pig + surprise axe' > 'sad pig + surprise axe'
Would this also mean
'no pig' > 'happy pig + surprise predator' > 'sad pig + surprise predator' I don't think nature is generally any better than (some kinds of) farming for prey animals. Should vegans be benefitting from lowering the birth rates among natural animals?
Or for that matter, does it also mean 'no human' > 'happy human + eventual death' > 'sad human + eventual death' Even in nature, all life is alive, and then it dies, almost always in a way it would not choose or enjoy. Does life just suck? Are we bad actors for having children?
Most vegetarians would think that activities that normally make animals suffer are bad in themselves.
Presumably the moral win in reducing or eliminating the suffering of farmed meat would have more to do with non-vegetarians than vegetarians. But really, is the point here to do something better than is already done, or is to impress vegetarians?
Would it be ethical to grow meat in a vat without a brain associated with it? Personally, I think pretty clearly yes.
So breeding suffering out of animals would seem to be between growing meat in a vat and what we have now. So it would seem to be a step in the right direction.
We, and animals, almost certainly have suffering because it had survival value for us and animals in the environment in which we evolved. Being farmed for meat is not that environment. I don't think removing suffering from our farmed animals has a downside. Of course, removing it from wild animals would probably not be a good thing, but would probably correct itself relatively quickly in the failure of non-suffering animals to survive.
Never heard of Circling until your post. Looked it up, initially find nothing going on in San Diego (California US). I wonder if it is more of a European thing?
If you know how I can find something local to San Diego CA US, please let me know.
I do think rationality is a niche. I had a conversation with a not-particularly-bright administrative assistant at work where she expressed the teachings of Jehovah's Witness as straightforward truth. She talked some of the chaos of her life (drugs, depression) before joining them. As I expressed the abstract case for, essentially, being careful about what one believes, it seemed clear enough to me that she had little or nothing to gain by being "right" (or rather adopting my opinion which is more likely to be true in a Bayesian sense) and she...
Does "value the welfare of others" necessarily mean "consciously value the welfare of others"? Is it wrong to say "I know how to interpret human sounds into language and meaning" just because I can do it? Or do I have to demonstrate I know how because I can deconstruct the process to the point that I can write an algorithm (or computer code) to do it?
The idea that we cannot value the welfare of computers seems ludicrously naive and misinterpretative. If I can value the welfare of a stranger, then clearly the thing for which...
Yes, there is class of investment strategies which go by the name of "liquidity constrained". If there is a small... market inefficiency out of which you can extract, say, $100,000/year but no more, none of the big investment firms would bother -- it's not worth their time. But for an individual it often is.
Can you please say more about these and how to find them?
Your insight is pretty consistent with a lot of philosophers, including my own personal favorite Daniel Dennett. Even if there is a pseudorandom number generator (or a quantum random number generator which might not be pseudo), that our "choices" would be random in this way does not really feel like what people want free will to mean. My reading of Dennett is that our "choices" arise from the law-like operation of our minds, which may be perfectly predictable (if there is no randomness only pseudorandmness of classical thermal noise) ...
Mais non, money is not "just" trade or "just" one way of getting something. Off the top of my head, money has multiple roles which include being:
medium of exchange (that's trade)
store of value
Which is time shifted trade. I.e. I trade a perishable good now (like my labor or a bottle of milk) for some money, I store it for a while, and then I buy something with it. I can't imagine that this is anything more than a description of what we mean when we say "store of value"
So far not mentioned in replies to this is that there are many examples of productive organizations that do not organize around money. Two leap to mind:
Military. Rarely do the various units and platoons trade with the other components of the military for their supplies, nor do they bid on missions. To the extent trade occurs it is usually barter and usually outside official accepted ways of doing things.
Business units. Large businesses may use separate calculations of returns to determine some very macro choices between business units.
But th...
But trade is just one way of getting something from others.
Yes nice summary of the original point of the entire thread. Money (which is trade, n'est-ce pas?) is just one way of getting something.
And the argument has been can we get more of something by abandoning money. And you and I have pretty much been saying "almost certainly not, what proposal do you have that hasn't already been discredited?"
My vote for most valuable insight applying as much to natural fitness as to economic behavior it is this:
The most important part of the environment is the humans and what they are doing. If I and my merry band of 100 or 1000 or even 1000000 or even 1000000000 tribe members are contemplating how we should supply ourselves with food, shelter, weapons, entertainment, & c., we should first, foremost, and with great care look to use what is already developed, invented, and produced by the rest of the world. You were concerned about warlords having troubl...
Interesting hypothesis. But it doesn't align with facts, bummer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_(vehicle)
Ants have an economy which is massively simpler than that of monetized humans. It is also massively less adaptable than is a human economy. Their interactions are hardcoded into their DNA, optimized for an environment that has persisted for many 10s of thousands of years without a lot of change because that's as fast as their DNA and natural selection can adapt.
Cells also, nonmonetized, have a hardcoded "economy." Human adaptability exists outside this cellular economy. This is why humans who live in cold environments, for example, buy clot...
I don't invent time travel for another 60 years. But I will get back to you in 2075.
Couldn't we get a precommitment from you to bring it back to 12/16/2015 once you have it?
Even if the goal could be reached in 20 years, it would take much more than 20 years to empirically test that the goal had been accomplished. In the prosaic world I come from we say brain-dead stuff like "if it isn't tested it doesn't work" and feel like we understand something important when we do so.
I would estimate approximately
MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM ...
Is it permissible to write III^^^III ?
Oh. I had assumed that "not planning for catering" fell in the "odd cases" category, but maybe I overestimate humans.
Its not that you overestimate humans but that you massively underestimate that amount of thought, work, and organization that results in a store of fresh healthy abundant food available for your nutrition. That complex chain involving thousands and millions of people, some producing the oil to lubricate the gears of the tractor or the delivery truck, some paving the roads, some setting standards for fuel composition a...
Another version of the starvation objection to this hypothetical is this:
Such a system would rather quickly result in large groups of people inventing ownership and protecting it by force, by threat of violence. Maybe not the first time the half-ripe tomato you don't own but which you planted is eaten by someone else before you eat it you will not sign on to this alternative. But if you manage to stay alive long enough, you will soon be trading your labor for food and be incredibly grateful that the same system which is LETTING you trade your labor for f...
Lumifer is a bit heavy-handed with his name-calling, but I think his objection is basically the right one.
The market is an information processing machine that solves problems too complex to be solved by any other means we have yet tried. Our entire experience with non-money economies is a stupefying lack of efficiency. But the OP asks about getting rid of ownership, not money, and that hasn't been tried.
So I have a refrigerator with some food in it and I'm set for the next day or two eating-wise. If I don't own the food in the refrigerator, by any r...
When doing the calculations be sure to QA your LYs. Spending an extra week lying doped up and in pain in a hospital bed may not be worth all that much. Also with medical research, you often wind up with a patented drug which then costs $1e5 per patient treated at least for the first decade or two of its use at least as used in the USA and other non-single payer countries. Or it requires $1e5 of medical professional intervention per patient to implement. My priors are that the low-hanging fruit is not in turning 90 year olds into 91 year olds, and won't be for many decades.
That is a little like suggesting that a sound recorder is just electronics and shouting at any electronics should elicit a response. Bringing it back to the neurons,
If, hypothetically, I tried to catch a terminal-velocity bowling ball with my face, your theory says I would experience the bowling ball doing nonfatal damage and then stopping just before killing me, and my theory says I would experience changing my mind and getting out of the way of the bowling ball.
So from the perspective of a you that I can talk to after the near miss with the bowling ball, your description makes sense. But it also makes sense to me. We are both in the universe where you changed your mind before the bowling ball hit you and you go...
I'm not certain that I understand your argument, so I may have responded incorrectly. Let me know if you need any clarification.
On re-reading, I actually misunderstood your original point and my argument has nothing to do with your original point.
I would still want to point out a few things that may make what is going on clearer.
First, Brownian motion amplitude rises as temperature rises. So while the Brownian motion of temperatures typically found in the ear, or in the air near the ear, is small enough that the ear can't detect it, as you say, if ...
Another thing to keep in mind is that at equilibrium, you have thermal excitation everywhere. You might as well ask why you don't hear or see or smell the thermal excitation in your own brain.
I think you are suggesting something like: if I was detecting thermal vibration by the vibration of a membrane due to thermally induced air pressure I wouldn't because the temperature is the same in the air on both sides of the membrane and therefore the thermal air pressure on each side of the membrane is the same and so fails to move the membrane. If this is wha...
Photons with over 1 Million electron volts of energy can create a positron-electron pair, but only when near another massive particle (like the nucleus of an atom). The other massive particle is moved in the interaction but is otherwise not-necessarily changed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production. This process has been demonstrated experimentally. The mean free path of the energetic photon near an atomic nucleus is something down on the atomic scale, the experiment I read about used a piece of gold foil and generated lots of positron-electron...
I think your argument is wrong.
If in my young age I am present in zillions of different universes, am I not conscious in each one of these? Am I not just as much a conscious being in the universes in which I die tomorrow, as I am in the universes in which I will die next week, as I am in the universes where I will live for 3000 years?
So what life path are you most likely to observe? You are most likely to "observe" ALL of them. If you were to pick one at random, what is the lifespan of the one you are most likely to pick? You would need t...
As far as I remember, you need to hit the resonant frequency of a particular hair to trigger a "sound" response, so frequencies higher than 20KHz might excite them, but if you're not getting resonance, nothing triggers.
No this is wrong. Each hair is excited by the amount of its particular resonant frequeny in the sound hitting it. If a violin note is heard, that note only has a few discrete frequencies in it and so a few hairs are very excited about it and the brain (of the trained violinist with perfect pitch anyway) goes "oh, A 440.&q...
As to molecule collisions, I'm not sure vibrations at sufficiently high frequency can be called "acoustic" at all.
Your reasoning here carries useful information. For example, when you are dealing with vibrations whose frequency is so high that the wavelength of the vibration is less than the average spacing between molecules in a gas, or in a solid lattice, then a lot of what you calculate about the detection and interactions with lower frequency vibrations no longer applies.
However, the same limitations apply to electromagnetic radiation. ...
The reasoning behind blackbody electromagnetic radiation applies equally well to thermal vibrations in solids and gases. Meaning the spectral limits derived from a quantum consideration of the quantization of electromagnetic radiation (into photons) applies equally well to the quantum considerations of vibrational radiation (into phonons).
"Thermal" photons are indistinguishable individually from photons from other sources. The thing that makes a thing thermal is the distribution and prevalence of photons in time and frequency, those from a th...
A hair cell that was triggered by Brownian motion would be useless. All inner hair cells are tuned to certain vibrations in the endolymph that are greater than those caused by Brownian motion.
Brownian motion is motion of air that, considered as vibrations, has a broad range of frequencies in it. Which means that an ear exposed to air experiencing a sufficiently high level of brownian motion will have many or all of its inner hair cells excited. If your statement was correct, humans would not be able to hear white noise, whereas obviously (to any hearing person who has ever been exposed to white noise) we can.
I think many of LW values are manufactured. I think you detect which are most manufactured by looking at the ones not widely held by other humans. Values like "you should get your head frozen when you die" are probably at the most manufactured end as they are nearly unique to LW and fellow travelers. Values like polyamory are pretty manufactured by do show up in a larger minority of non-LW types than head freezing. Values like a world with 3**3 created AIs in it that are a little happy is better than a world with 1 billion humans in it who ar...
You can't hear temperatures because if the temperatures of air were high enough to make enough noise for you to hear, you would be incinerated.
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110540/how-loud-is-the-thermal-motion-of-air-molecules goes over this. There is a lot of error in that thread, but the parts that are right show up a few times and calculate the white noise sound level of room temperature air at about -20 dB SPL. SPL of 0 dB is the approximate threshold of human hearing. dB is a logarithmic scale such that every 10 dB increase is a 10X...
Happiness is the indicator for whether or not a thing works for people.
I don't think so.
Prevalence is the primary indicator of whether or not a thing works for people. Does a civilization which promotes patriotism in the local population make the people happier by doing this? I doubt it. But they probably do make their civilization more robust, more fit in a survival sense by doing so.
I would one box. Clearly spending $1000 for an expected $8000 return is generally speaking a Good Thing (tm). Over the course of my life if I always take the higher expectation value choice when offered these choices, then by the central limit theorem I will be almost certainly better off than if I generally take the lower return Sure Thing. So except for extremely odd corner cases where the sure thing is a life saver, the rational policy is to not be seduced by lower return sure things. And $1000 is not a life saver for me and actually at no point in ...
retracted
This is my first time seeing this quote and it is a good one. Took me a minute to realize what he was saying. And I've been hanging out on this site for years.
I can't stop you from saying or thinking I should have noticed the quote before, if that's the way your mind works. But in reality I am not unique and I am not an idiot and if I find something particularly useful here there is likely a significant minority of the rest of the readers who find it useful. Which is sort of consistent with the quote.
I'd like to join how do I do that?