I have signed no contracts or agreements whose existence I cannot mention.
They thought they found in numbers, more than in fire, earth, or water, many resemblances to things which are and become; thus such and such an attribute of numbers is justice, another is soul and mind, another is opportunity, and so on; and again they saw in numbers the attributes and ratios of the musical scales. Since, then, all other things seemed in their whole nature to be assimilated to numbers, while numbers seemed to be the first things in the whole of nature, they supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.
If it is encoding relevant info then this would be the definition of steganography
Note that "smartphones, computers and more electronics" are exempt. I'd guess this would include (or end up including) datacenters. The details of the exemption are here.
This hardly seems an argument against the one in the shortform, namely
Neither a physicalist nor a functionalist theory of consciousness can reasonably justify a number like this. Shrimp have 5 orders of magnitude fewer neurons than humans, so whether suffering is the result of a physical process or an information processing one, this implies that shrimp neurons do 4 orders of magnitude more of this process per second than human neurons. The authors get around this by refusing to stake themselves on any theory of consciousness.
If the original authors never thought of this that seems on them.
but most of the population will just succumb to the pressure. Okay Microsoft, if you insist that I use Edge, I will; if you insist that I use Bing, I will; if you insist that I have MSN as my starting web page, I will
Only about 5% of people use edge, with 66% chrome and 17% safari. Bing is similar, with 4% marketshare and Google having about 90%. I don’t know the number with MSN as their starting page (my parents had this), but I’d guess its also lower than you expect. I think you over-estimate the impact of nudge economics
That's an inference, presumably Adam believes that for object-level reasons, which could be supported by eg looking at the age at which physicists make major advancements[1] and the size of those advancements.
Edit: But also this wouldn't show whether or not theoretical physics is actually in a rut, to someone who doesn't know what the field looks like now.
Adjusted for similar but known to be fast moving fields like AI or biology to normalize for facts like eg the academic job market just being worse now than previously. ↩︎
Claude says its a gray area when I ask, since this isn’t asking for the journalist to make a general change to the story or present Ben or the subject in a particular light.
This doesn’t seem to address the question, which was why do people believe there is a physics slow-down in the first place.
(you also may want to look into other ways of improving your conscientiousness if you're struggling with that. Things like todo systems, or daily planners, or simply regularly trying hard things)
It seems reasonable to mention that I know of many who have started doing "spells" like this, with a rationalized "oh I'm just hypnotizing myself, I don't actually believe in magic" framing who then start to go off the deep-end and start actually believing in magic.
That's not to say this happens in every case or even in most cases. Its also not to say that hypnotizing yourself can't be useful sometimes. But it is to say that if you find this tempting to do because you really like the idea of magic existing in real life, I suggest you re-read some parts of the sequences.
The strong version of this argument seems false (eg Habryka's comment), but I think the weak version is true. That is, energy put into "purposely and deliberately develop a technology Y that is fundamentally different than X that does the same role as X without harm Z but slightly less competitively." is inefficient compared to energy put into strategies (i), (ii), and (iii).