All of Erik_Mesoy's Comments + Replies

Your link for "The V-Dem Institute's tracker" does not point to that, it points to DWB which is giving its own take on a link to the V-Dem Institute, which in turn is broken so I can't check it. This might be the one intended: https://www.v-dem.net/documents/12/dr_2021.pdf ?

Umberto Eco's list is extremely low quality. Several of its items are stock traits of bad government; if you mean bad government you should say "bad government" and not "fascism". Eco is a rhetorician, please stop citing him as though he's a political scientist.

I think this post is enga... (read more)

"AAAAIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE" ?

If the Singularity is the Rapture of the Nerds, self-modification of the brain must be Hell; a way to screw up to an arbitrary degree that most people don't even understand well enough to fear.

Phil: The first source I found was here: link "The rationale for not divulging the AI-box method is that someone suffering from hindsight bias would say "I never would have fallen for that", when in fact they would." -Nick Tarleton

I also call it "reasoning by exception" since most of the people I know have studied more code than biases.

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I tried the AI Box experiment with a friend recently. We called the result a tie of sorts, as the AI (me) got out of the original box in exchange for being subject to a bunch of restrictions s... (read more)

Thomas: As I understand the quote, we do not perceive them. The machinery does. Then we are the thoughts it thinks about those thoughts.

Is it possible to get this filed under Humor so that I can view the series without having to hunt this entry down individually?

michael vassar: I meant "horrible" from my current perspective, much like I would view that future me as psychopathic and immoral. (It wouldn't, or if it did, it would consider them meaningless labels.)

Dynamically Linked: I'm using my real name and I think I'd do things that I (and most of the people I know) currently consider immoral. I'm not sure about using "admit" to describe it, thought, as I don't consider it a dark secret. I have a certain utility function which has a negative valuation of a hypothetical future self without the s... (read more)

The post says "when you finally got hungry [...] what would you do after you were done eating?", which I take to understand that I still have desire and reason to eat. But it also asks me to imagine a proof that all utilities are zero, which confuses me because when I'm hungry, I expect a form of utility (not being hungry, which is better than being hungry) from eating. I'm probably confused on this point in some manner, though, so I'll try to answer the question the way I understand it, which is that the more abstracted/cultural/etc utilities ar... (read more)

Something's been bugging me about MWI and scenarios like this: am I performing some sort of act of quantum altruism by not getting frozen since that means that "I" will be experiencing not getting frozen while some other me, or rather set of world-branches of me, will experience getting frozen?