All of Jon2's Comments + Replies

Jon250

I can certainly understand your dissatisfaction with medieval depictions of heaven. However, your description of fun theory reminds me of the Garden of Eden. i.e. in Genesis 1-2, God basically says:

"I've created the two of you, perfectly suited for one another physically and emotionally, although the differences will be a world to explore in itself. You're immortal and I've placed you in a beautiful garden, but now I'm going to tell you to go out and be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over all living things;... (read more)

0Odinn
I knew there would come a day when almost a decade of mandatory bible classes in private school would pay off. (That's not true, I've generally written it off as a really depressing waste of my mental resources... still) You've got the order of events in the Garden of Eden backwards. After God finished up and took off for Miller Time, Adam and Eve had nothing to do. They didn't need clothes or shelter, all animals were obedient and gentle, they had to live of fruit for eternity which would get old, the weather and season (singular) was always the same and they were the only those two people in existence with no concept of there ever being any more. Sure, they would have lived forever, but there was no challenge, inspiration, reason or stimulation. Only AFTER the forbidden fruit and the knowledge of good and evil does God start up Eve's biological clock and issue the 'be fruitful and multiply' command, society starts to develop, there's a ton of implicit incest (er... bonus?) and they can cook up a nice lamb shank to break up the monotony. Once again, the literal interpretation of the bible leaves a lot to be desired in a literary sense, because the Garden of Eden is one of the most depressing 'paradises' ever devised. Also, here I go again responding to many-years-cold comments.
2tygorton
This logic assumes that a beyond human intelligence in a redesigned world would still find inherent value in free will. Isn't it possible that such an intelligence would move beyond the need to experience pain in order to comprehend the value of pleasure? According to the bible, god created different aspects of the world across six days and after each creation he "saw that it was good". Yet nothing ELSE existed. If there had never been a "world" before, and evil had not yet been unleashed, by what method was this god able to measure that his creation was good? One must assume that god's superior intelligence simply KNEW it to be good and had no need to measure it against something "bad" in order to know it. Couldn't the eventual result of AI be the attainment of the same ability... the ability to KNOW pleasure without the existence of its opposite? Isn't the hope (or should I say fun?) of considering the potential of AI that such a vast intelligence would move life BEYOND the anchors to which we now find ourselves locked? If AI is simply going to be filled with the same needs and methods of measuring "happiness" as we currently deal with, what is the point of hoping for it at all? This is a bit of an afterthought, but even at our current level of intelligence, humans have no way of knowing if we would value pleasure if pain did not exist. Pain does now and has always existed. "Evil" (or what we perceive as evil) has existed since the dawn of recorded human existence. How can we assume that we are not already capable of recognizing pleasure as pleasure and good as good without their opposites to compare them to? We have never had the opportunity to try.
Jon210

Sure this isn't a utopia for someone who wants to preserve "suboptimal" portions of his/her history because they hold some individual significance. But it seems a pretty darn good utopia for a pair of newly created beings. A sort of Garden of Eden scenario.

Jon200

Sure this isn't a utopia for someone who wants to preserve "suboptimal" portions of his/her history because they hold some individual significance. But it seems a pretty darn good utopia for a pair of newly created beings. A sort of Garden of Eden scenario.

Jon2100

Generic,

The y appears on both sides of the equation, so these are differential equations. To avoid confusion, re-write as:

(1) (d/dt) F(t) = A*F(t) (2) (d/dt) F(t) = e^F(t)

Now plug e^At into (1) and -ln(C-t) into (2), and verify that they satisfy the condition.

Jon200

Chris, I'm not sure that endogenous growth models are less precise than models of nuclear fission relative to the amount of noise in the available data.

By the way, when are Elie and Robin going to start talking in terms of precise probabilities of general AI scenarios? Or did I miss that? It just seems that they've mostly been adding detail to their predictions to make them seem more believable, which goes against everything I've read on this blog (No offense intended).

Jon200

There is an extensive endogenous growth literature, albeit much of it quite recent.

Jon200

I think you're mis-characterizing Christian morality. The Bible makes a clear distinction between merely obeying laws, and internalizing good behaviors. It even acknowledges that the former can be quite dangerous, i.e. from Romans 7:

"For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code."

-4MugaSofer
There's a tendency for some people to overlook the NT perspective on "the law", a tendency that has resulted in such ironies as Victorian laws banning playgrounds on the Sabbath (well, Sunday.) And, of course, recent opposition to homosexuals.
Jon200

Your calculation neglects the issue of timeliness. You assume that all the expected damage to firm profitability took place as a result of the movement of p(passage by Oct 31) from 1 to 0.85.

I don't think that this is the relevant event. The flow of credit is frozen now, and every day that this blockage remains in place causes further damage to the Economy and increases the odds of a Keynesian Death Spiral.

The bailout's defeat shifted p(Passage in the next few days) from something pretty high to 0, while decreasing p(passage by Oct 31) by a little. In my view, the markets were primarily reacting to the former adjustment.