Father had told Draco that to fathom a strange plot, one technique was to look at what ended up happening, assume it was the intended result, and ask who benefited.
What if we assume that the COVID pandemic was the intended result?
Generally, people are biased toward doing what is easy and pleasurable, and making excuses to justify it.
Anecdotally, two programmers who might have occasionally used cocaine ended up quitting their programming jobs to become artists, and have been slowly spending their savings for a few years, working toward making a living through their art (unlikely, they're OK but not that great yet) and thinking the same tier of programming job will be available for them to go back to (doubtful). I strongly suggested that they should both go into AI programming, but they are too normie to listen. So my anecdotal evidence is that the cognitive impact of cocaine is that it makes people make irrational decisions.
Human nature suggests that an all-powerful council-of-elders always becomes corrupt, so that approach might not be possible either.
Good luck man. I did a different kind of engineering, but here is some advice I wish I had heard 15 years ago:
https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2009/03/12/some-thoughts-on-grad-school/
...Thought #6: Listen to the Married Graduate Students and Ignore the Unmarried Students Who Live in the Dorms
Students with families have perspective on life and friends outside of the university. They tend to be happy and productive and think sleeping on the futon in your office is childish. They also bathe every day. Which is a nice bonus. The students who are unmarried an
It occurs to me that if PG&E were evil, it might decide that it's cheaper to secretly hire 'fire vigilantes' to start fires which PG&E is not responsible for, than to bury the cables.
I think they went extinct ultimately because these effects started a process that gradually invalidated the preconditions for reliable cultural transmission in that species
Yeah. I hope Youtube knows what it's doing.
In the videogame "Starcraft", it's economics (macro) that wins wars. A player can win every single battle (micro) and still lose the game, if the other player's economy is improving their relative position faster than they are losing militarily. A common tactic is to make small attacks on the other player's economy production units, attempting to do a lot of economic damage without fighting any military units. The true scope of the damage might not be obvious, since the "fog of war" conceals most of what the other player is doing. I remember one game where...
This is a beautifully written story. One criticism is that it seems to have a Moral that assumes the Blue cryonicist acts as he does in the story... an entertaining story, but limits the applicability of the Moral. In particular, signing up for cryonics and going out in a blaze of glory are really quite opposite personality traits if you think about it.
Thank you for the kind words.
"What good is life experience to someone who plays Quidditch?" said Professor Quirrell, and shrugged. "I think you will change your mind in time, after every trust you place has failed you, and you have become cynical."
"You have to get seriously burnt by friends/employers/family members (ideally all three) over women/money/jobs (again ideally all three) before you realise that you create more hassle for yourself and crush opportunities if people perceive you to be smart/rich/well connected. Most people simply are not worth knowing and are too insecure to be good friends with."
Jesus christ dude.
I put a check mark for today on the calendar I use to track my Quirrelmort-inspired cynicism.
But even though crime happens, that doesn't mean that everyone is a criminal.
Brains evolved to enable people to exploit dumber people.
It sounds to me like what might have happened in your case is that you focused really hard on being "good" and not so much on being "powerful"
I naively believed the best way to get a good wife was to act like a good husband.
It turns out that the best way to get a good wife is to be po...
Don't let the fact that bad female actors exist deter you from having happy relationships with good female actors.
"Good" = doing what benefits others. "Bad" = doing what benefits me.
It's safest to assume that any woman will dump/manipulate/cheat me the second it's in her best interest to do so.
It's safest to assume all guns are loaded.
Nope, the best case scenario is to marry the chief or otherwise secure the commitment of a high status man.
Nope, for any given high status man the woman is able to marry, there exists an even hig...
You're still doing it. Surprise + shaming instead of argument.
"Being surprised" is privileging your own beliefs over others.
Denying the realities of class doesn't make them go away. Your beliefs are the map, but the terrterritory includes rich people who own the brands that own your mind.
Can you argue the content? "Old" and "unpopular" are weak refutations.
Classism is part of current politics, as well as my personal experience.
I don't follow what about my beliefs is surprising to you, then.
But the point is the whole framework where the important thing about the girl is that she's a proletarian and the about that man is that he's bourgeoisie.
Yes. Making generalizations about groups of people is a powerful, useful tool for decision-making.
express my surprise without you reading it as shaming?
Your surprise implies criticism. I assume you believe "it's dirty/wrong to generalize about groups of people. it's especially dirty/wrong to have negative beliefs about poor people and about lower-class people". I appreciate the criticism, though I imagine you find my beliefs repugnant.
Pretty accurate. Why sacrifice, when the payment is shame, not praise? Why be a good person, when I am called a weak coward for not taking as much as I can?
acted to prevent, what he thought to be, the global catastrophic risk?
That makes it all OK, right?
Hooray! I can be sociopathically self-centered as long as I describe it in a politically-correct way!
I hope you continue to find happiness.
Do you have actual evidence that [Elon Musk was pushed out of PayPal by a secret cabal of global financiers who wanted to ensure global financial markets stayed opaque] or is it just a hunch?
Just a hunch. But, "to understand a complex plot look at the outcome and see who benefits."
Cuckoldry seems relatively rare in non-self-selected populations.
Over 1% risk for unsuspecting men is enough that I'll paternity-test all of my children prior to claiming legal fatherhood.
...For an emotionally stable woman, a committed relationship with a respec
So it was OK for them to lie to me?
I did not say that.
To fix this mistake, internalize the fact that the rules don't apply to you. The rules apply to people who follow the rules.
Sounds like you're saying lying is OK.
If you ask for a favor that you know he can easily do and he says “no” this does not imply that the person is mean. Instead? It implies that he has no reason to grant the favor.
That's selfishness...maximizing one's own utility at the expense of total utility. Apparently this is OK.
...Roosh (Red Pill thought leader) has written mult
I'm sexually attracted to overachievement. Your question is paradoxical.
No...Voldemort isn't altruistic, and considers the "global community" too disorganized to be an ally worth seeking favor with.
A nice proletarian girl isn't supposed to sleep with a bourgeoise man, that makes her worse than a slut -- that makes her a traitor.
If she can get a bourgeoise man to marry her, good for her. But chances are she won't, and she will never tell the proletarian man she ends up marrying about her past with the bourgeoisie man. This causes the proletarian man to suffer increased health risks.
I'm somewhat surprised to find this attitude on the 'net in 2016.
This is liberal shaming language.
A lot of great topics here.
Elon Musk has risked his entire fortune for you.
I am a huge fan of Elon Musk.
I suspect a big reason Mr. Musk tries to make the greatest possible positive difference for humanity is to reduce his risk of being murdered by established players. He’s pissed off a lot of powerful people, but provided benefits to many more.
He was forced out of controlling PayPal...and his vision for PayPal was to make it a “full-service financial institution”. He wanted to “convert the financial system from a series of heterogeneous insecure datab...
True. Voldemort would have spent less time sulking than I have.
OP wants me to help stop global catastrophic risks.
It's illegal to hurt the people who created the global catastrophic risks, so count me out. I don't work for free. I'd rather enjoy a nice life.
"Why, no," said Professor Quirrell. "I stopped trying to be a hero, and went off to do something else I found more pleasant."
"What? " said Hermione without thinking at all. "That's horrible! "
I don't ask but it comes up. Certain occupations have corresponding values, that align with "cooperate" or "defect" strategies. For example, scientists "cooperate", while criminals and finance guys "defect" whenever they think it'll be profitable.
I notice you are using shaming language. I realize my beliefs are unusual but I am not clear what your question means.
Assuming this is all true...it's not at all clear that cooperation is my best move.
I refuse to sacrifice my life to protect billionaires who would not do the same for me. I won't labor under pointlessly annoying conditions to protect an ownership class that despises the technological progress and growth that I worked to create.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but...scientists get less sex than criminals.
In my personal experience...all of my ex-girlfriends had sex with someone who doesn't share my values -- a criminal, a future lawyer/financier, or an ac...
Modest proposal for Friendly AI research:
Create a moral framework that incentivizes assholes to cooperate.
Specifically, create a set of laws for a "community", with the laws applying only to members, that would attract finance guys, successful "unicorn" startup owners, politicians, drug dealers at the "regional manager" level, and other assholes.
Win condition: a "trust app" that everyone uses, that tells users how trustworthy every single person they meet is.
Lose condition: startup fund assholes end up with majority...
Create a moral framework that incentivizes assholes to cooperate.
So, capitalism?
Oh no! The AI would make us hate each other before betraying us.
Makes sense.
It all breaks down if my consciousness is divisible. If I can lose a little conscious awareness at a time until nothing is left, then Quantum Immortality doesn't seem to work...I would expect to find myself in a world where my conscious awareness (whatever that is) is increasing.
I wish I could quantify how consciously aware I am.
Can you say a little more about what specific past observations are not matched by a sophisticated version of Quantum Immortality?
The 20th-century physicists speculated a lot about it. Schrodinger's Cat, the Wigner's Friend problem, etc. But in the absence of a test for consciousness they mostly went on to other things.
That summarizes the "what" of the idea. The "why" part is that classical physics violations are improbable so timelines with lots of classical physics violations would be improbable.
In terms of conscious experience, dreamless sleep and death feel similar, as far as I know.
My naive linear model is that ~$400 billion research funding currently spent per year buys about 1 year increased lifespan per decade, so it would take about $4 trillion per year spent on research to stop aging, or a one-time investment of $80 trillion. For 99% confidence I'll add a safety factor of 4, yielding a one-time payment of $320 trillion, or $16 trillion per year. In other words, this back-of-the-envelope guess suggests the entire economic output of the United States would be just sufficient to discover and maintain an aging cure.
Can I recruit followers? Starting a cult is a useful exercise for ambitious rationalists.
The "Wigner's Friend" experiment has some interesting examples that physicists already thought about.
whether this is a "correct" way to describe reality
I'll find out in about 100 years.
I don't know if anyone else is conscious, but if they are, and they die in my branch of reality, then in my theory they experience a branch of reality in which they continue living.
seems indistinguishable from any other regligious belief in infinite life
I agree it's pretty similar. I have to accept the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation, and it's a short hop from that to full-on theism.
It's a flawed argument but if for some reason there was a high complexity penalty to being born in an older Universe then it could be more likely to be born in a younger Universe where immortality technology has not quite been invented yet.
I agree provided the many-worlds interpretation is correct, which seems likely.
If the consciousness-causes-collapse interpretation is correct (which seems less likely), then the special form I described might still work. But I can't count on it.
In that case, it seems like Quantum Immortality doesn't work.
And here I thought I was safe. Dammit.
Thank you again for the thoughtful reply.
Your brain decoheres a zillion times per second. Your consciousness is far, far, far into the classical regime.
Observing does not cause collapse. Events which cause the wavefunction to split into dynamically separate parts do, and those happen at the same rate in a system regardless of how you cut it.
Eh? Observing is the only thing that causes collapse.
I agree that there are constant tiny thermodynamic events that, if observed, could cause decoherences a zillion times a second. But, usually these events are not...
I love this forum.
If I understand the experiment, your theory is that quantum weirdness makes it more likely to see four heads in a row because you resolved to flip many more coins if you don't.
Sounds fun. I'll flip four coins (actually use a string of 0's and 1's that's 4 bits long). If I don't get four heads, I'll generate a 10-digit sequence and memorize it. Let's explore this frontier!
I did it. It didn't work. My new favorite number is 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1.
Reality hack failed.
Let's try again. If I don't get 4 heads, I'll memorize a 20-digit number.
It d...
Counterexample: I go to sleep (lose consciousness) and wake up again. QI seems to predict that I would never fall asleep, because I stop observing when I'm asleep and so QI would force me into universes in which I don't fall asleep. Timeless QI has no problem with me falling asleep and then observing I'm alive and awake hours later.
Thanks for the criticism.
summary: 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. It looks like our key disagreement is whether Quantum Immortality only operates over short timescales. You say it only acts in an instant, and I say it acts over long time intervals as well.
longer argument: I'm not convinc...
This distinction is irrelevant to the main point: I expect to experience living forever without experiencing unusual luck. This is true regardless of whether MWi-QI or Tegmark's MU theory is more accurate.
My sense is that the political risk exceeds the disease risk.