All of ckai's Comments + Replies

If I understand the sort of thing you're talking about correctly, I like Miles Vorkosigan's solution (from Memory, by Lois McMaster Bujold):

"The one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart."

I was not commenting on goodness or badness, just simulacraness.

Are you saying that assigning titles according to a system that you think is how titles should work makes the title a more accurate truthful signal about actual social reality than assigning titles according to the way titles are generally assigned industry wide?

It seems to me that this is not the case, because assigning titles that are inaccurate (according to industry standards) in either direction causes confusion.  In the case of title deflation, the excerpt above suggests that it mak... (read more)

It seems to me that they're both doing exactly the same thing:  assigning titles according to a method that's not industry standard for reasons of their own.  Maybe industry standard is more meaningfully simulacra level 3 (in the social truth sense) than either of them?

The efficiency of a process is the rate with which it turns what you have into what you want.

This definition seems to imply that what you have is not what you want (fair enough, I guess), and that the process is a means to get what you want, and the process itself is also not a part of what you want.

Since life is a process (I do not believe that the one who dies with the most toys wins), efficiency under this definition is trading away a part of life for some end result that you want.  (And I think that people tend to object to efficiency in human thi... (read more)

I'd also say it's kind of sweet that you assume that people who are pursuing the arts find it to be rewarding, or that the camaraderie that keeps these communities knit together is a pleasant experience.

Actually, that was an element that you introduced.  "We don't want people working a job primarily because it's fun and they like their coworkers."  and "the occasional bright spots of camaraderie when they do manage to get some sort of project going"  

But given your description of "a slowly-developing psychological exaggeration of how meaning... (read more)

I know a successful author who says he started writing because he noticed authors get more attention at cons.  FWIW.  (I'm pretty sure he gets something out of the work itself, and yet, this is the story he tells.)

Observing this discussion, your point seems to be that there are some people in the world who do things because they are fun rather than because they are worthwhile (IYO), and that the world as a whole would be better if these people were less able to have fun so that they would be more motivated to do worthwhile (IYO) things.  Giv... (read more)

You could see it as a portrait of a man who's stuck at simulacra level 3 (in the masking the lack of reality sense, not so much the signaling sense, though you can also watch him deciding which signals to send and which he's just going to ignore even though he knows he should send them).  He not only lacks the epistemic tools to see reality except in glimpses before retreating to his fortress of banality, but is scared of reality and so doesn't want to, despite his near-constant boredom and misery.  And so he dies in confusion, a banal, narcissis... (read more)

Yes, I agree with that.  Of course it's meaningful!  It wouldn't be a reflection of reality if it wasn't.  But meaningful isn't the same as complete or undistorted.

For example, I think it's meaningful (maybe not the most insightful thing that could possibly be said, but meaningful) to talk about the original Star Trek in terms of head, heart, and gut as reflected in the characters of Spock, McCoy, and Kirk.  I don't think this covers everything that Star Trek is, or everything that those characters are, or everything that real people ca... (read more)

But The Gervais Principle is a model of a tv show, not directly of reality.  I haven't seen the particular show, but most tv shows are not trying to model reality, but reflect it, and distorting it is fair and even expected.  There's an argument to be made that the distortions are what makes it interesting.

Do you see this differently?

I'm reminded of this:
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-you-broke-the-future.html

(And no worries.)

That's a really different scenario from the historical one.

I'd like to note that I didn't say the governors were stupid (nor do I believe that people in the past were stupid), just that they were likely to be very different in outlook and understanding about the world and likely to act on these ways of thinking (and I also think that the world was also different and some of their understanding may be more accurate for their time).  I was trying to question the notion of control, which I think is a question that still holds in the AGI scenario.

When you... (read more)

I'm not sure that works when you're not starting with a unified culture.  Long term long distance delegation may only work if everyone shares the same doctrine, more or less, went to the same schools, has similar ideas about what the goal is, has similar loyalties, etc.  You install a governor in India and you have some idea of what sorts of things they may do, because you know how they were brought up.

But if you write to a subordinate "Sounds like we need to increase moral" and the next thing you hear about they've killed a lot of people and put... (read more)

What level of communication technology do you consider necessary?  It seems that in order to control the whole world, you'd need a pretty high level of communication technology.

Okay, but what is a bicycle?  

Is this?  
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/Michauxjun.jpg/682px-Michauxjun.jpg

Is this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1886_Starley_%27Rover%27_Safety_Cycle_British_Motor_Museum_09-2016_(29928044262).jpg

What about this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Draisine_or_Laufmaschine,_around_1820._Archetype_of_the_Bicycle._Pic_01.jpg

Except for the pneumatic tire, about which I really have no idea, it seems pretty likely that a blacksmith and/or clockmaker in the past <i>could</i> make... (read more)

You may find that this is a cycle.  At some points you may need to process for yourself and give more weight to what you think, but at some points you may feel the need for more information or an outside point of view.

Yeah, I don't feel like that really covers it.  Maybe what I meant wasn't really utility per se, but rather an intuition about people ragequitting this system not just because of the moving issue but because of a lot of little unpredictable annoyances adding up, with moving into a new space being one example of how this could happen.  It seems like the more things change, the more unexpected annoyances are likely to pop up, whether within a living space, a neighborhood, the whole city, or whatever.

Like, a lot of people move one month (it could ev... (read more)

I think you're underestimating the utility of living in the same place for periods longer than a month.  Most real places have some problems that are annoying at first but easy (or at least possible) to work around once you've had a chance to figure out what the work arounds are.

You should probably also consider that some people will want to keep their preferences private, so giving everyone access to all preferences for the purposes of distributed optimization doesn't seem reasonable.

It seems pretty important to know who are the people who get to vote later on.  Since Twitter is a social network, is it people who are networked in some way, or is it random Twitter users, or...?  It seems like this could work very differently depending on exactly how it's implemented.  And how it works will influence whether anyone is willing to stake their cred on the results of a vote of this group of people.

What incentivizes anyone to vote at all, or to vote accurately?

Ah, I was looking at your comment in the other direction, do ads cause prosperity or are ads correlated with prosperity (and having a hard time forming a model that ads cause prosperity while not finding ads being correlated with prosperity significant, really).  But I guess you were saying more that ads are a sign of prosperity and so even if they're annoying it's better than living somewhere that isn't prosperous enough for ads?

Do you consider this connection to be correlation or causation?

I am an outsider/lurker, so maybe I just don't get it, but it seems to me that even if the messaging around this event is changed to make it more clearly serious rather than there being a possible interpretation of all in fun no particular outcome is better than any other, there is a very real (not symbolic) mixed message going on with the way things are currently set up.  The first message is hey, we're doing this really cool ritual and you are invited to participate.  The second message is we don't want our website to go down so don't do anythi... (read more)