All of CronoDAS's Comments + Replies
One case of the changing the level of friction drastically changing things was when, in the late 1990s and 2000s, Napster and successive services made spreading copyrighted files much, much easier than it had been. These days you don't need to pirate your music because you can get almost any recorded song on YouTube whenever you want for free (possibly with an ad) or on Spotify for a cheap subscription fee...
There's one more scenario that often occurs in real life: often both sides of a potential patent fight are licensing different patents to each other. If Alpha Corp demands exorbitant licensing fees from Beta Corp, Beta Corp can threaten Alpha Corp with similar licensing fees that would cancel out any increased revenue Alpha Corp could extort from Beta Corp. As a result, neither side ever actually wins a patent fight, so they don't start.
Patent trolls are particularly likely to become predatory because, since they don't manufacture anything, they don't actu...
on the grounds that their political mindkillery effects trump their relevance to this discussion
Pun intended? ;)
But yeah, it's getting off-topic and there's plenty of other places to discuss that kind of thing.
I believe that Trump is, in fact, exactly that clueless and completely unaware of how clueless he is.
Edit: For the record: my biggest reason for believing this is having read reports of what many mainstream Republicans who worked under him during his first term have said and written about what he was like.
Yeah, in Star Trek, genetic engineering for increased intelligence reliably produces arrogant bastards, but that's just so they don't have to show the consequences of genetic engineering on humans...
Do we have it in any other animal besides cows? Dogs? Housecats? Fruit flies? Guinea pigs? Any other short-lived animal commonly used in laboratory research that still has a decent amount of genetic diversity?
If you do not have compulsory patent licensing with court-set fees, then why should any one patent troll--or even the holder of a rare real patent--stop short of demanding the company's entire profit?
In practice, there are often substitutes for whatever it is that the patent owner has a patent on - if someone has a patent on making wheels out of metal and won't let you license that patent at a reasonable price, you can still make wheels out of wood or stone instead even if they're not nearly as good. So there is a limit to the amount of revenue that a p...
And yet you will observe that in all public political discourse that makes it onto TV, all the sober talking heads in business suits are talking as if by subsidizing people with $120 checks we are causing their bank accounts to go up by $120, rather than talking about how many new universities or doctors or houses the $120 checks will cause to exist.
On the bright side, the discourse might be getting a little bit better in places. Some years ago, a California politician proposed helping renters by making rent tax deductible. The proposal was immediately mocked as being a giveaway to landlords.
I have an objection to the section titled "supply and demand are always equal". In my Econ 101 textbook, "quantity supplied" and "quantity demanded" are always equal; the terms "supply" and "demand" only referred to supply curves and demand curves. Maybe this is a nitpick, but I think it's an important one. I'd like to propose some rather significant edits to that section and to the following one about subsidies, but is this the kind of page where it's okay for changes to come from anyone, or is it important that it stay "by Eliezer Yudkowsky"?
It's not agreed among economists which countries today might be suffering from too little aggregate demand, and working under capacity. The economists in my preferred school suspect that it is presently happening inside the European Union due to the European Central Bank being run by lunatics.
This may have been true in 2017, but post-COVID inflation suggests that it's not true anymore.
Are there really people in the world who can do nothing that anybody else with money wants?
Yes. These people are often called "disabled", "retired", or "children". For example, a person with severe Alzheimer's disease or schizophrenia is unlikely to be able to produce much of anything at all. Most people, if they live long enough, will eventually suffer enough damage from aging that they semi-voluntarily remove themselves from the labor force. Similarly, your average two-year-old probably isn't going to be productively employable either, regardless of t...
many theoretical computer scientists think our conjecture is false
Does that mean that you (plural) are either members of a theoretical computer science community or have discussed the conjecture with people that are? (I have no idea who you are or what connections you may or may not have with academia in general.)
1Looking good to his superiors is the one thing the Pointy-Haired Boss is actually good at. Several strips show that some of his ridiculous-seeming decisions make perfect sense from that perspective.
<irony>Robustly generalizible like noticing that bacteria aren't growing next to a certain kind of mold that contaminated your petri dish or that photographic film is getting fogged when there's no obvious source of light?</irony>
Elaborating on The Very General Helper Strategy: the first thing you do when planning a route by hand is find some reasonably up-to-date maps.
One thing that almost always tends to robustly generalize is improving the tools that people use to gather information and make measurements. And this also tends to snowball in unexpected ways - would anyone have guessed beforehand that the most important invention in the history of medicine would turn out to be a better magnifying glass? (And tools can include mathematical techniques, too - being able to run statist...
Hmmm. Taking this literally, if I didn't know where I was going, one thing I might do is look up hotel chains and find out which ones suit my needs with respect to price level and features and which don't, so when I know what city I want to travel to, I can then find out if my top choices of hotel chain have a hotel in a convenient location there.
Meta-strategy: try to find things that are both relevant to what you want and mostly independent of the things you don't know about?
For some reason, this story generated a sense of dread in me - I kept waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop.
Well, you could start by looking at the cosmetic differences achieved by dog breeders as a lower limit to what it is possible to acheive by tinkering with a genome...
1Straight-up diminishing marginal utility of wealth, then?
Well, that's the Bay Area for you - ground zero for both computer-related things and the hippie movement.
The answer to your specific question about the Fermi Paradox is that, after an AI destroys its creators, the AI itself would presumably still be there to do whatever it wanted, which could include plans for the rest of the universe outside its solar system. So "AI that kills its creators" still leaves us with the question of why we haven't seen any AIs spreading through our galaxy either.
I live in New Jersey and have no job and lots of free time. How can I do this for someone without moving to the Bay Area?
Human capital is worth nothing after you die, though.
Does the answer to "should I buy insurance" change if the interest rate that you earn on your wealth is zero or even negative?
Although I don't quite fit the broader diagnosis, the phrase "demand avoidance" does describe how I've been at my low points - what I wanted most at those times in my life was to be free from obligations in general, such as the obligation to go to school, the obligation to get out of bed, the obligation to eat food, etc. - for there to be absolutely nothing that I would "have to" do if I preferred not to do it. Unfortunately, taking that impulse - to be free to do absolutely nothing, without anyone or anything influencing me otherwise - to its logical extr...
I did have an "internship" right after college for a few months and was completely miserable during it. The other problem was that one thing I valued highly was free time, and regardless of how much money and status a 40 hour a week job gives you, that's still 40 hours a week in which your time isn't free! There are very few jobs in which, like an Uber driver, you have absolute freedom to choose when and how much to work and the only consequence of not working for a period of time is that you don't get paid - you can't "lose your job" for choosing not to s...
Quite possibly. I did get an ADHD diagnosis as a kid...
Yeah, except that sometimes I'm weirdly insensitive to punishments and other threats. For some reason, my brain often (mistakenly?) concludes that doing the thing that would let me avoid the punishment is impossible, and I just shut down completely instead of trying to comply.
As I once wrote before:
...Guy with a gun: I'm going to shoot you if you haven't changed the sheets on your bed by tomorrow.
Me: AAH I'M GOING TO DIE IT'S NO GOOD I MIGHT AS WELL SPEND THE DAY LYING IN BED PLAYING VIDEO GAMES BECAUSE I'M GOING TO GET SHOT TOMORROW SOMEONE CALL THE FUNERA
Pets often make their needs quite obvious if you "forget" to take care of them. When my dog wants something from me, he won't leave me alone until I figure out what it is.
They can also be immediately rewarding and stay that way. I wouldn't necessarily recommend a goldfish, but if you're already an animal lover it's hard to become bored with a dog or cat.
Ten-year-old me had an objection to the idea of "willpower" on principle. Obviously, "Willpower" is the process by which people get themselves to do unpleasant things. I don't want to do unpleasant things. Therefore, having as little Willpower as possible will minimize the unpleasant things I end up doing.
Another way I've found myself with a lack of ability to motivate myself seems related to the post's original thesis. Up until I finally graduated college, my typical use of "willpower"-based motivation would be to do something I'd rather not have to do (u...
I donated $100. I'm fairly income-constrained at the moment so I'd be nervous about donating more.
2That might be okay. But I reserve the right to refuse to treat any possible "mind" that does not participate in the arrow of time as though it did not exist.
A while back, I decided that any theory of cosmology that implies that I'm a Boltzmann brain is almost certainly wrong.
Something like that!
I've heard that, in Las Vegas, if you put yourself on the government's "compulsive gambler" list, you can still walk into any casino, give them your money, and place a bet - the only difference being that, if you happen to win, the casino keeps your money as if you had lost.
I think it should work the other way around, making it the casino's responsibility to avoid accepting bets from self-proclaimed problem gamblers - if you're on the list and the casino doesn't stop you from betting, the casino has to give you back any money you lose.
It's also trivial to make a perpetual motion machine with Portal portals. Just have a portal in the floor that teleports you to the ceiling directly above it, then drop a ball into it. It'll fall forever, accelerating until it hits terminal velocity (at which point all the gravitational potential energy goes to heating the air it falls through).
If you don't want to just throw out conservation of energy, using a portal to "lift" things would have to take the same amount of energy as lifting it through normal space does.
Sometimes I remember having had the thought "this is a dream" while dreaming, but doing that doesn't really give me any extra "conscious" control over what happens - all it does is let me "decide" to wake up.
I have yet to be able to successfully make a Google search during a dream - what I "intend" to search for is never what appears in the box I'm trying to "type" the search query into.
Jacen Solo became an evil Sith because the people in charge of the Star Wars franchise at the time thought having the brother named Anakin Solo be the one to do it would be too ridiculous. The rest is writers trying to make the decisions of a Pointy-Haired Boss make sense.
I think I've probably spent the majority of my 42 years of life in a laziness death spiral. ☹️
In other words, aggressively run away from your goals, and reflect on how miserable it is to live that way. The reflection is crucial: if you’re self-forgetful / not mindful about it, you’ll risk staying in that state. Do it for a week or two, reflect on how much it sucks, and in doing so you’ll condition your mind to view the goal as a valuable opportunity to escape that misery (which it is).
When I do this kind of thing, it tends to be called "depressive rumi...
5I have no idea!
Treason doth never prosper; what's the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason.
The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
The quote is from an appendix that consists entirely of epigrams that are attributed to one of the characters in the play - it's not actually part of the play as performed. (Shaw was tired of "smart" characters in plays that don't actually do anything to show that they're smart so he wrote it to justify the character's asserted intelligence.)
(The joke here is that, given the other axioms of ZF set theory, each of these three things can be used to prove the other two - they're either all true or all false, regardless of how plausible or implausible they might seem on their own.)
If things go wrong[1] then our neural net will conclude that it has high status despite all evidence to the contrary. We have programmed schizophrenia.
No, you've programmed grandiose delusions - a lot more goes wrong with schizophrenia than just that.
I had one as a kid along with who knows what other diagnoses. I'm not on any medication for it but I also feel like don't really need it the way my life currently is?