All of Strange7's Comments + Replies
"at least those people working in the sweatshops aren't homeless"
Bizarrely enough there are many people who have jobs, yet cannot afford housing. Something about rising real estate prices.
A union makes sense when the workers have specialized interests, but for unskilled labor isn't it simpler just to work through the overarching government?
Personally I would expect large corporations and the very rich to be capable of defending their position against any reasonably predictable shift in the economic environment, since they have resources and motivation to lay out more comprehensive contingency plans than anyone else. That extra productivity from "Job 2" doesn't just vanish into the aether. Higher minimum wage means the poorest people have more money, then they turn around and spend that money at Walmart.
The ones who lose out from a higher minimum wage would be the middle managers, w...
This is an adequately accurate summary, though you may have missed the pun.
"Let's help everyone equally, or in proportion to their needs or something" is easier to agree on than "let's devote the entire GDP of Russia to my personal enjoyment, and maybe my friends and allies in proportion to their loyalty." With the former, people quibble over definitions and in-groups and details of implementation; the latter, even Putin dares not propose openly.
I'm not claiming that propensity to charity or altruism causes, or even particularly correlates with, economic development. I'm just saying that economic development i...
Some combination of Social Security Disability payments, caring friends and family, private-sector charities, and hospital emergency rooms that aren't allowed to check for ability to pay before providing treatment. It's a bad system with a lot of cracks to fall through, and a distressing number of poor people suffer miserable pointless deaths.
Colonizing the galaxy is a political problem, not a question of engineering possibility. A sufficiently zealous world government could jump-start asteroid mining with an Orion Heavy Lifter, construct mirror arrays near the sun, and start lobbing around interstellar VNMs, all with relatively simple refinement and application of existing technologies. Problem is, the best way of putting a complete industrial base into orbit runs afoul of certain atmospheric nuclear test ban treaties.
Without a reactionless drive there's no point sending a colony ship faster than about 60% of the speed of light. Gotta save some remass to decelerate.
It's an investment.
When you have some asset that you don't immediately need, and somebody else would be able to make better use of it, renting it out or giving it away enriches the whole system. Then you get to live in that richer system and enjoy the benefits. Your quality of life is better when you live somewhere with reliable electricity, uncensored internet, and trivial access to potable water, right? A fancy car isn't much fun without fuel or decent roads.
Helping somebody on an altruistic basis is just another transfer of resources toward where they'...
Pretend to be a radical environmentalist or something.
An explicit argument that lack of regulation would produce better results than the current regulatory system is not the same thing as disliking and actively opposing the current system yet having no idea what to replace it with.
I'm fully aware that there's more to nautical charts than the water's surface, and I used the term 'satellite photography' somewhat broadly. More of the deep ocean has been mapped by sensors in polar orbits, which can stay on-station indefinitely and cover the entire globe without regard for local obstacles, than ever was (or likely would have been) by surface craft and submarines.
Henry George was looking at the labor market, and pointing out that you can't really understand the causes of large-scale unemployment, "the paralysis which produces dullness in all trades," without looking all the way back up the supply chain, if necessary to natural resources and how they're being used or prevented from use, until you find something necessary that's not being supplied. Can you find a counterexample to THAT claim, a cause for general unemployment which can't be traced back to a lack of supply?
As far as literal charts of literal bodies of water on the surface of the earth, satelite photography actually has pretty much solved that problem.
As far as metaphorical waters, human civilization is larger than most people really think, and consists disproportionately of people finding and publishing answers to interesting questions. "Don't assume the waters are uncharted until you've done at least a cursory search for the charts" is sound advice.
A poorly put together gun is perfectly capable of crippling the wielder, and most bombs light enough to throw won't reliably kill everyone in a room, especially a large room. Also, guns are harder to get right than bombs. That's why, in military history, hand grenades and land mines came first, then muskets, then rifles, instead of just better and better grenades. That's why the saying is "every Marine is a rifleman" and not "every Marine is a grenadier."
A well-made Friendly AI would translate human knowledge and intent into precise, m...
Just to make completely sure I understand you here... you went looking for something that's not a natural resource underlying major economic issues, but could still affect those issues, and the best answer you could come up with was the sun ? The local star, that gigantic nuclear furnace whose radiant energy is the source of power for all photosynthetic life on earth, excepting maybe some geothermal-powered grow-lights in Greenland or something. That sun, that's the one you're referring to?
If solar energy flux abruptly changed by even one percent, up or do...
There might be an 'extinct in the wild, building up a viable breeding population in captivity' situation, though.
So start with a quick sweep for functional-looking knives, followed by pieces of armor that look like they'd cover your skull or torso without falling off. No point to armor if it fails to protect you, or hampers your movements enough that you'll be taking more hits from lost capacity to dodge than the armor can soak up.
If the walls don't seem to have closed in much by the time you've got all that located and equipped, think about the junk you've already searched through. Optimistically, you may by this time have located several instances of the same model...
Alright, so you bring this alleged time traveler with you to visit two or three different psychologists, all of whom are appropriately surprised by the whole 'time travel' thing but agree that you seem to be perceiving and processing the facts of the situation accurately.
Furthermore you have a lot of expensive tests run on the health and functionality of your brain, and all of the results turn out within normal limits. Camera-phone videos of the initial arrival are posted to the internet and after millions of views nobody can credibly figure out how it cou...
If you've been fooled, there's still no point to calling it impossible, given that you're trying to find out what actually happened.
with democracy acting like a smokescreen for the voters - to give them an illusion of control, and to prevent them from revolting.
Voting prevents revolts in the same sense that a hydroelectric dam prevents floods. It's not a matter of stopping up the revolutionary urge; in fact, any attempt to do so would be disastrous sooner or later. Instead it provides a safe, easy channel, and in the process, captures all the power of the movement before that flow can build up enough to cause damage.
The voters can have whatever they want, and the rest of the system does it's best to stop them from wanting anything dangerous.
Let's say you're about to walk into a room that contains an unknown number of hostile people who possibly have guns. You don't have much of a choice about which way you're going, given that the "room" you're currently in is really more of an active garbage compactor, but you do have a lot of military-grade garbage to pick through. Do you don some armor, grab a knife, or try to assemble a working gun of your own?
Trick question. Given adequate time and resources, you do all three. In this metaphor, the room outside is the future, enemy soldiers are...
I'm saying the control systems on the plane constitute an artificial intelligence, advanced enough to do almost all the work of flying the plane but not general enough to do anything unrelated to flying the plane, and (at issue) not friendly enough to tell the pilots "this is likely just a little ice clog, in which case you don't need to do anything" or, later in the catastrophe, "the single most important part of stall recovery is bringing the plane's nose back down," let alone override their panicky incompetence outright and act on such simple suggestions itself.
Suppose there's only a limited demand for the goods produced and the other company uses technology that lets it fewer workers than the first one did.
"Labor-saving" innovations are simply increases in efficiency. If the new process allows more of the same (or equivalent) goods to be produced with less inputs, the price will drop and demand will increase. Significantly lower cost might even open up completely new applications for the goods.
My objection is to the 'set amount.' What about the Bunny Ears Lawyer trope, where someone purchases additional weirdness points with a track record of outstanding competence?
The neighbor is possibly going to attack... why? Maybe because they want something you have, that they could seize by killing you? Such as your land? The term "lebensraum" comes to mind.
Communist ideology, likewise, exists to promote communist political policies, which have a number of major differences from capitalist (or, say, monarchist) policies when it comes to how natural resources should be exploited on industrial scales and how the products of that industry should be directed. Workers controlling the means of production, and so on.
As for ...
I'm not saying that someone making the "understand when you're older" argument is being dishonest. They might not even be incorrect. It's just that, if that's the best case they can come up with, even after thinking it over, you're probably better off making your decision on some basis other than their opinion.
It's not that there aren't any people whose unsupported assertion is more trustworthy than an explicit, persuasive-sounding argument for the opposite side, though certainly individuals of such discernment and integrity are rare. The issue is that any person so reliable would also necessarily have enough underlying intelligence to be able to, in any situation not involving implausibly extreme levels of time pressure, construct a better (or at least more contextually specific) argument than "you'll understand when you're older." The only plausible explanation for being so vague is if they not only don't want to tell you, but are further trying not to provide enough keywords for you to look up the real reason yourself.
Superior competitors don't tend to cause widespread unemployment, though. People just go work for the company that's on the rise.
As for uncertainty about a coming war... he's saying that it all comes back to natural resources, access to land, and sure enough that tends to be what wars are about.
Homeownership makes employees less willing to relocate, but also more tolerant of short-term decreases in the demand for their skills, since they can postpone maintenance on a house (or perform it inefficiently themselves with the surplus time) more safely than they can miss rent payments to a landlord.
"Haha, no, of course I don't believe in monkeys transforming into humans! That'd never work. I just think they diverged from a common ancestor, many hundreds of thousands of years ago. Surely you're aware of the differences between, say, sunni and shia islam, despite both believing that all the same prophets said all the same things, and splitting only a few hundred years back? To say nothing of the other Abrahamic religions.
Think of a living organism as being like a city, with cells like individual households, each keeping their own copy of DNA scrip...
Nobody believes that....
I cannot recall any instance of a claim in that format turning out to be correct.
Parrots can talk; a parrot named Alex even accidentally learned how to spell out a word for emphasis when the listener didn't seem to be paying attention. Pre-curse, this "snake" wasn't crawling around on the ground. Maybe it was just a slightly cleverer species of parrot.
You could say they died of insufficient friendly AGI, but not from an AGI that was insufficiently friendly.
If there was some non-negligible probability that the study was bad, RationalWiki would, given their dislike for chiropractics, have seized upon that and discussed it explicitly, would they not?
Marriage to Kim Kardashian is not contagious.
As far as we know! Perhaps it simply has a long incubation period, and transitive polyamory will be legally recognized some time in the 2020s.
It's only a No True Scotsman if you can point to an actual citizen of Scotland who doesn't meet the 'true Scotsman' standard.
You are conflating two claims here. One is that chiropractic is more expensive than conventional treatments for lower back pain, and the other is that chiropractic is less effective than conventional treatments for lower back pain. What support do you have for the latter claim?
You just borrow more.
And/or authorize the police to steal.
You haven't made an argument that indirect funding is the best way to go
On this point we are in agreement. I'm not making any assertions about what the absolute best way is to fund research.
and you've made baseless claims.
Please be more specific.
There's nothing to respond to: the burden of proof is on anyone who claims that bizarrely indirect mechanisms through flawed actors
All humans are flawed. Were you perhaps under the impression that research grant applications get approved or denied by a gleaming crystalline logic-engine handed down to us...
'Breakthroughs and basic science' seem to be running in to diminishing returns lately. As a policy matter, I think we (human civilization) should focus more on applying what we already know about the basics, to do what we're already doing more efficiently.
I didn't say it was the only effective funding mechanism. I didn't say it was the best. Please respond to the argument I actually made.
"Modern-day best-practices industrial engineering works pretty well at it's stated goals, and motivates theoretical progress as a result of subgoals" is not a particularly controversial claim. If you think there's a way to do more with less, or somehow immunize the market for pure research against adverse selection due to frauds and crackpots, feel free to prove it.
if you want research, buy research
Focusing money too closely on the research itself runs the risk that you'll end up paying for a lot of hot air dressed up to look like research. Cool-but-useless real-world applications are the costly signalling mechanism which demonstrates an underlying theory's validity to nonspecialists. You can't fly to the moon by tacking more and more epicycles onto the crystalline-sphere theory of celestial mechanics.
why did evolution build us to place fundamental emotional and normative value on conforming to what any rational selfish agent will figure out?
If you're running some calculation involving a lot of logarithms, and portable electronics haven't been invented yet, would you rather take a week to derive the exact answer with an abacus, and another three weeks hunting down a boneheaded sign error, or ten seconds for the first two or three decimal places on a slide rule?
Rational selfishness is expensive to set up, expensive to run, and can break down catastrophically at the worst possible times. Evolution tends to prefer error-tolerant systems.
problems other than math and science problems
No such thing.
For any given problem, once a possible solution is reached, do you expect to be able to check that solution against reality with further observations? If so, you have constructed a theory with experimental implications, and are doing Science. If not, you have derived the truth, falsehood, or invalidity of a particular statement from a core set of axioms, and are doing Math.
Would it have fit into less space than the set of possible programs for the Z80?
What about Honda?
For the play money iterations, that assumption would not hold.
Why not? People can get pretty competitive even when there's nothing really at stake, and current-iteration play money is a proxy for future-iteration real money.
Thank you! If I was the other clone and heard that I was about to play a game of PD which would have no consequences for anyone except the other player, who was also me, that would distort my incentives.
fighting the hypothetical
It's established in the problem statement that the experimenter is going to destroy or falsify all records of what transpired during the game, including the fact that a game even took place, presumably to rule out cooperation motivated by reputational effects. If you want a perfectly honest and trustworthy experimenter, establish that axiomatically, or at least don't establish anything that directly contradicts.
Assuming that the other party is a clone with identical starting mind-state makes it a much more tractable problem. I don't have much idea how perfect reasoners behave; I've never met one.
We're all empiricists here, so let's run an experiment. You've got this theory that gjm won't understand if you try to explain. How 'bout you stop rehashing that, actually try to explain some of those technical terms you mentioned earlier, and see how your theory holds up?