This idea seems like it has several large issues:
Thanks for your thoughts ACrackedPot 🙂
Sounds like a stressful model to think about! Maybe I'm just too much of a pacifist for that mindset. But I agree that friction is absolutely a critical part of democracy. A big part of that is giving people a non-violent way to settle disputes and come to consensus over limited resources.
What does it mean for a cryptocurrency to "transition from PoW to PoS"? What does it mean for decentralized entities to come to a consensus on a massive change to how they operate?
Decentralized governance is really hard, and chains split all the time - remember Bitcoin Classic? Ethereum Classic? All pretty dead now, but in their day they represented substantial chain splits that took a long time to fully resolve.
So, I would say that such a transition is mostly a question of decentralized governance, not a question of technology. If Bitcoin "transitio...
First, it labels a society that's in civil war where decisions are made by the sword as democratic provided everyone has equal power and is equally effected.
Thanks for your thoughtful reply ChristianKl :)
Such a broken-down society doesn't have a system of governance, and we explicitly say that this is a property of a system of governance. A power vacuum within which a system would normally sit is distinguishably different to a functioning state. So, it seems like we would fully expect this definition to fail here at no fault of its own.
...Secondly, it i
Thanks very much for your thoughtful reply MakoYass, I agree with everything you've said here. It's certainly a strange line to straddle personally, where I'm totally on-board the crypto train but also a radical environmentalist. But I also look forward to speculation being ripped out of the crypto ecosystem as much as possible and replaced with functional value. One day soon, we can hope.
But that isn't what I want, and it's not what I'm saying here. At no point do I make the claim that the values represented by the safety team are or should be static. I understand the point you're making, I've even written about it pretty extensively here, but as far as I can see it's a much more general ethical issue than the domain of this essay. It applies just as readily to literally any organisation as it does to the theoretical organisations proposed here.
Specifically what values wider society holds and how they evolve those values is not the purview...
I'm not 100% sure if your intention is to equate democratic governance with this lottery hypothetical, but I'm not quite sure the two can be compared. As to how important or nominally good I might perceive value drift as, well I think it's rather like how important the drift of your car is - rather dependent on the road.
So the concept of "redistributing equally" gets kind of complicated.
Ah yes, you're right in redistributing the 50 tokens when refunding the winners in the same proportion is tricky. Probably necessitates being able to have fractional tokens so you can refund someone 0.1 token or something like that. I imagine it will be very simple for the losing choices.
Also, I don't mean a regular Dutch auction, I mean a blind one where all bidders submit their bid at once (like an election). My understanding of a blind Dutch auction is that it resolves this "people don'...
Why would it bother?
We can't really speculate too strongly about the goals of an emerging AGI, so we have to consider all possibilities. "Bothering" is a human construct of thinking that an AGI is under no obligation to conform to.
An AI that isn't using all it's compute towards it's assigned task is one that gets replaced with one that is.
This is why I specify that this is an emerging AGI, where we are in a situation where the result of the iterator is so complex that only the thing iterating it understands the relationship between symbols and output. We c...
I'd be lying if I claimed to fully grok the maths, but I'm glad it was a useful suggestion!
The tyranny of the rocket equation means that we're going to really struggle to make it worth it. For the same reason that we can't just make fuel tanks bigger, it is very inefficient to send fuel out from the same gravity well as you want to refuel from - orders of magnitude.
The thing to remember when we talk about "kg of fuel per kg of cargo" is that the vast majority of that fuel is burned in the lower atmosphere. The majority of the work of shooting a rocket off to space is just getting it moving. So if you want to ship enough rocket fuel up to form a fuel dump with something like hydrogen rocket fuel, then you need to expend vastly more fuel than you end up storing.
Interesting, you make some great points here and I don't think I have any good refutations to any of them. Perhaps if we play around with the auction structure by which we take away and refund these tokens?
Hello Gerald! For sure. To be honest the Kessler syndrome was an afterthought and I may be overestimating its impact. I think the far more relevant danger is active measures against a launching or landing craft. Things like fuel dumps (you are totally right in that it doesn't make sense to take fuel from Earth up into LEO, I was more thinking about bringing fuel from some other much-lower-energy gravity well like the moon) would probably be better placed in Lagrange points.
I imagine something similar would be true of space; in times of war, some nations would be unable to access their colonies
Maybe I'm vastly underestimating how self-sufficient these colonies will be, but my impression from current plans for permanent habitation is that they will depend on shipments from Earth for basic supplies for quite some time. Strong claim held weakly, someone please prove me wrong on that. But I imagine it's going to be a heck of a lot of extra straw on an already overloaded camel's back.
Kessler syndrome isn't a huge issue when you're...
Mary aquires the new, novel experience of believing that she has seen the color red, when she previously held the belief that she only had perfect, but non-subjective knowledge. Qualia does not necessarily need to be new information as this attempts to demonstrate, it just is whatever is different about your mind when you actually experience a thing.
That's a great point! There is that possibility, but do we need to make that assumption? I'm not sure.
Mary would be able to tell us if "qualia did not differ in ways known only to the person who had them", even if she might not be able to describe to us exactly how. She'd be able to say "that was different", even if the precise words to describe how it was different escaped her, and that true/false response is enough to draw some meaningful conclusion about the existance of something, even if it doesn't tell you anything about the nature of that thing. And if it's completely imperceptable to Mary, then it can't be qualia, as qualia is by definition about subjective perception.
Is this true? e.g. Gallup shows the fraction of US vegetarians at 6% in 2000 and 5% 2020 (link), so if there is exponential growth it seems like either their numbers are wrong or the growth is very slow.
Well the nature of exponential growth includes a long tail, but yes, it does appear that over the past few decades there has been substantial growth in many areas, with the UK reporting 150,000 vegans in 2006 compared to 600,000 vegans in 2018. Additionally, the vegan food industry "$14.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $31.4 billion by 2026,...
May I clarify, when you said:
Maybe that is subjectivity itself. Maybe qualia are how observes perceive their own brain states.
You then said that this summary was a departure from physicalism. Could you explain what you meant by that? It was that statement that made me think you were saying that a belief was non-physical, as you said qualia being a belief was a departure from physicalism.
If you are saying that qualia are just beliefs that is a different claim, and one that you havent supported.
Oh dear... I think we might be in a bit of trouble, as I'm under...
Was that your point/conclusion?
I mean it was a point that I made from just playing around with the thought experiment. I don't know if it is the point, that's why I'm trying to dissect it a little here.
What I'm not understanding is your argument for getting there. Either it's not valid, or I don't understand what you mean.
I would be happy to keep trying to explain. Let me try to lay it out again in a different way, and I'd be interested to hear what you think:
Gotchas aren't an entirely bad thing, because at least you would be making a discernable point.
Well, I apologize that this has not been clear for you. I am somewhat surprised that you can so elegantly summarize my position while simultaneously saying I haven't made that position, but maybe I'm just a lot, lot worse at expressing myself than I think I am haha.
I asked you directly whether you were asking or answering ...and you did not answer!
Sorry, I'm not sure what this is regarding exactly. As in, am I asking Mary questions? Yes. Or am I asking a q...
I apologise TAG, I can't say I'm trying to "gotcha" anything intentionally, just to discuss an interesting thought experiment.
I don't know what the test is that you could perform, though I tried to present one possibility - your beliefs around that memory.
It matters here because I am specifically addressing Jackson's views on Physicalism as presented in the original thought experiment, not all general views of qualia. The core of the question is if that is because of some physical phenomena.
Maybe that is subjectivity itself. Maybe qualia are how observes perceive their own brain states.
Yes, that is a good summary of what I am proposing here.
Because that test reveals what the actual qualia of the experience is - what separates all of the information about an experience from the subjective essence of that experience. The qualia of an experience is not simply the ability to recall that experience, or simulate that experience in your mind.
Hi gilch! I apologise that this was confusing, hopefully I can clarify what I am trying to say here. Thanks for your in-depth response.
Nothing.
Yes, this was the answer that was meant to be inferred here. Maybe I could have been more clear that this is the correct answer. There isn't really any question that you can perform to determine which Mary genuinely had the experience and the Mary which did not.
I think it might be useful to think about Mary's room in more abstract terms, to avoid these contextual assumptions we make about the nature of qualia li...
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Joachim!
I am definitely not saying that NFTs are not bad for the environment - they are, as is anything that draws on the mains grid and creates demand. It is absolutely correct to judge cryptocurrency negatively, just as it is correct to judge things like driving a gas guzzler or flying 20 times a year. But it seems like we completely ignore some ways in which the energy we produce is wasted, and hyperfocus on others, and we just end up with a completely screwed up valuation of what needs changing.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply Daniel!
Cheaper spaceships are definitely cheaper to replace if some oppositional nation-state blows them up, but there's only so many times you can play that game before you end up with the Kessler syndrome issues.
If you're referring to the vertical launch and takeoff of SpaceX shuttles, that really only affects the last moments of reentry. A SpaceX shuttle still does the vast majority of its braking in the atmosphere.
Launching in weird orbits is absolutely a strategy that nation-states could use to mitigate these risks, but...
At a minimum they also impose harms on the people who you convinced not to eat meat (since you are assuming that eating meat was a benefit to you that you wanted to pay for). And of course they make further vegetarian outreach harder .
I think the largest issue with the general concept of moral fungibility is the following:
Sorry TAG I'm not quite sure I follow, but I do appreciate your feedback. This post is a refutation of Jackson's view, so I'm not surprised that it is focusing on a negative. Whether something would alter the quality of those experiences is the crux of Jackson's whole thought experiment - asking what changes between a mind with perfect information about an experience, and a mind who has genuinely had that experience. So, that question does seem at the heart of this thought experiment.
Perhaps a different way to think about Mary's Room is the following:
You h...
If there are any experiences or qualia, even changeable ones, Jackson has made his point.
Has he? As I understand it, Jackson is arguing specifically for a non-physicalist interpretation of qualia in his work, not just for the existance of qualia. He is arguing that you can have perfect information about an experience, yet actually experiencing that thing will still bring some new aspect to the experience, and whatever that aspect is is the qualia. The issue is with the nature of what the qualia of an experience is, and whether there is a physical manifesta...
We were looking for to disappear, indicating that the probability of a candidate no longer factors into our considerations.
I'm surprised that we are looking for to disappear entirely, I'm not sure I understand that. Quadratic voting shines when you have lots of votes with the same voting token pool, because you force people to allocate resources to decisions they really care about. It's absolutely not meant to decide one decision - it's meant to force people to allocate limited resources over a long period, and by doing so reveal...
Hey TAG, thanks for your reply and your great points.
If you could show that Mary never experiences a colour quale, whether as the result of a direct experience, or a real memory, or an implanted memory, you refute the argument.
Well, I don't believe I'm trying to say that the color quale doesn't exist - rather that the quale is the subject's beliefs around that experience or memory, and that those beliefs are entirely physical constructs that exist within a physical brain.
...What's the problem? If Mary has a present experience of a blade of grass, she will hav
Another solution to "Objection 1: Quadratic voting discourages voting on losing propositions" is the idea that only the winners of a quadratic vote actually pay an average of the tokens, and everyone else gets a refund - sort of like a blind Dutch auction of the decision.
For example, a quadratic vote is taken between two binary options A and B. A receives 400 votes, B receives 500. B wins the vote, so an average of 450 is taken from the voting token pool of B and 50 tokens are redistributed equally amongst B. Everyone who voted for A gets a full refund.
Con...
I suppose the question is whether we can predict the "hidden inner mind" through some purely statistical model, as opposed to requiring some deeper understanding of human psychology of an AI. I'm not sure that a typical psychologist would claim to be able to predict behaviour through their training, whereas we have seen cases where even simple, statistical predictive systems can know more about you than you know about yourself - [1].
There's also the idea that social intelligence is the ability to simulate other people, so perhaps that is something that an ...
Retailer console base prices are set by the manufacturer. A first-party retailer is not allowed to charge more than the RRP as part of their agreement.
Perhaps an important economic point here is that consoles are generally sold below-cost. Console manufacturers lose money on every product they sell from hardware costs. This is because consoles make their money on games, where the margins are much ... (read more)