Note that “continuous” does not need to be “linear” or similar to that. Maybe the qualia decrease exponentially with the complexity of the structure that experiences them, so maybe each particle has a technically non-zero quality, but still all particles in the universe together have less of an experience than a single human. Numbers can be technically non-zero, and yet zero-ish for most practical purposes.
Viliam
Yeah, that it as stupid situation as I expected.
A reasonable rule would be like “a person with health problem X gets Y money”, full stop. Anything else means regulating how people need to live (usually requiring them to make the worse choice) so that they do not lose the support.
why specifically sounds arranged in patterns through time over anything else?
We already have speech, so the progression could be something like: saying the same things (repeating what the high-status person or the the person you love said)… saying the same things together (in a religious ritual)… singing together… listening to the music (and imagining that you are singing along?)
The optimal solution could be to have both a human and an AI partner. (A kind of polyamory.)
marrying someone while on disability
Never heard this mentioned explicitly, but I assume the idea is that you would lose the money, because your spouse has an income, right?
In my country (not USA) we have the concept of “full disability” and “partial disability”, and I know a guy who technically would be eligible for the partial disability, but he doesn’t bother doing the paperwork, because the money he would get would not be enough to survive… and when he gets any extra income, then he loses the partial disability, because apparently this cheater is capable of work. Which is kinda sorta true, but ignores the fact that out of many possible jobs, he must be looking extra hard to find one that is compatible with his specific health problems (no sitting, but also no hard work, accessible by mass transit because of no sitting in a car, etc.), and while such jobs exist, they are quite rare. (Basically, “partial disability” only makes sense for people who are also supported by their family.)
For this guy, UBI even on the “can’t really survive on it” level would be already a huge improvement.
days starting with S
September 1st
September 2nd
September 3rd
...
That said, there are also discussions that suggest the poverty trap—i.e. overwhelmingly strong labor disincentives for poor, from outrageously high effective marginal tax rates from benefits fade-out/tax kicking-in—may be partly overrated, so smoothing the earned-to-net income function may not help as much as some may hope.
I just skimmed the linked article, but it seems to me that it makes some “spherical cow” assumptions. For example, if you get a job, even low-paying, you should gain more money on the wage than you lose at social benefits. But you also need to consider additional costs of having job, for example the commute. And that’s often the problem in practice, that “wage > benefits”, but “wage—commute < benefits”. The article seems to ignore such things.
I agree that even with UBI, people with special needs should get extra.
Thank you for the answers, they are generally nice but this one part rubbed me the wrong way:
And this is before factoring in the “economic value” of better psychological and physical health of people who work on small farms vs. those who eat processed food on their couches that is done from the crops grown on monoculture mega-farms, and do nothing.
If I live to see a post-scarcity society, I sincerely hope that I will be allowed to organize my remaining free time as I want to, instead of being sent to work on a small farm for psychological and physical health benefits. I would rather get the same benefits from taking a walk with my friends, or something like that.
I do not want to dismiss the health concerns, but again these are two different problems—how to solve technological unemployment, and how to take care of one’s health in the modern era—which can be solved separately.
To me it seems like UBI and negative income tax are just two ways to describe the same thing, two ways to write the same equation that give the same numerical results. It’s like arguing why 2x+6 is better than 2(x+3). More precisely, negative income tax sounds like “UBI, but you need to do tax reports”.
My other objections are relatively trivial compared to this, so shortly:
Simplicity of the system is a good trait, in my opinion. The current systems has various costs (time and money, but maybe more importantly, opportunities wasted by perverse incentives) associated with proving that you are eligible for some benefit. Plus you need to pay the people who verify all this evidence. Making the benefit universal would remove these costs.
Tax reforms to favour employment sounds like creation of bullshit jobs. It would depend on exact details, but if a machine can do something as well or better than a human, then the machine should do it.
What does “foster labour voice” even mean? Especially in companies where everything is automated. You can give more power to current employees of current companies, but soon there will be new startups with zero employees (or where, for tax reasons, owners will formally employ their friends or family members). Giving more power to labour will not matter when the new zero-labour companies outcompete the current ones.
Human-complementary AI technologies again sounds like a bullshit job, only mostly did by a machine, where a human is involved somewhere in the loop, but the machine could still do his part better, too.
Tax on media platforms—solves a completely different problem. Yes, it is important to care about public mental health. But that is separate from the problem of technological unemployment. (You could have technological unemployment even in the universe where all social media are banned.)
Technical answers are likely to be obsolete in a few months when the next versions of AIs are published.
In the meanwhile, if a person you know calls you, ask them about some experience you had together that wasn’t documented in writing.
A piece of text… maybe Ctrl+F “as a large language model”? :D
An image… count how many fingers on each hand, and how many hands on each person.
School degree may not be a strong signal, but it is legible. If I don’t know math, I have no idea whether your math articles make sense, or you’re a crackpot. If I don’t know programming, I have no idea whether your commits are good. But everyone knows what “I have a degree” means. So basically, school degree is better for “impressing a lot of people a little bit”, while the things you did are better for “impressing a few people a lot”. Neither is strictly superior to the other.
School typically tries to teach you a lot of things. You could learn any of them much better on your own, but it is unlikely that you would learn all of them, because there is too much knowledge out there. University-educated people will probably judge the knowledge they learned at university as elementary, so from their perspective, you have many gaps in elementary knowledge, which seems bad, even if you have deep knowledge in something else.
And there will always be the question: “if you are smart enough to succeed at school, why didn’t you?”
So… if getting the degree is cheap, obviously go for it.
How can expectations exist without roles? When everyone is free to do whatever they want to, no one can expect anything specific...
Well, we can still have general, i.e. not gender-specific expectations, such as: people should be nice and emotionally mature. Nothing wrong with that. But it seems like the traditional gender roles also provided some gender-specific “hacks”, and now we don’t have them.
Or you could ask which traits are valued at the dating marketplace, or more specifically at the part you are interested in. But there is no general answer anymore; it depends on what you are looking for. For example, if you want to have a traditional relationship, it would make sense to behave according to the traditional roles, and expect the same from your potential partners. Other subcultures have different rules. And I suppose most people are confused, do random things, get random results, then hopefully learn and try something different.
I am afraid that even asking this question would be perceived as horribly patriarchal today.
My parents’ generation would probably say “cooking” and maybe a few more things, dunno.
Former teacher here. Like avancil said, education is organized by amateurs. Having it organized by non-teachers has its own risks (optimizing for legible goals, ignoring all tacit knowledge of teachers), but there should be some way to get best practices from other professions to teachers. Also, university education of teachers is horribly inadequate (at least at my school it was), and the on-job training is mostly letting the new guy sink or swim.
To handle multiple things, you need to keep notes. As a software developer, I just carry my notebook everywhere, and I have a note-keeping program (cherrytree) where I make a new node for each task. So if I was a teacher again, I would either do this, or a paper equivalent of it. (Maybe keep a notebook with one page per student. And one page per week, for short notes about things that need to be done that week. I would just start with something, and then adapt as needed.)
Yeah, the inability to take a bathroom break when you need it can be really bad. There should be a standard mechanism to call for help; just someone to come and take care of the class for 10 minutes. More generally, to call for assistance when needed; for example what would you do if a student got hurt somehow, and you need to find help, but you also cannot leave the class alone. (Schools sometimes offer a solution, which usually turns out to be completely inadequate, e.g. “call this specific person for help”, and when you do, “sorry I am busy right now”.) There should probably be a phone for that in the teachers’ room, and someone specific should be assigned phone duty every moment between 8AM and 3PM, and it’s their job to come no questions asked.
Debates about education are usually horribly asymmetric, because everyone had the experience of being a student, but many of them naively assume they know what it is like to be a teacher. Now you know the constraints the teachers work under; some of them are difficult to communicate. I think the task switching is exhausting in a way that is difficult to imagine if you haven’t experienced it. (Could depend on personality, though. ADHD?) New things keep happening all day long, and you have no time to process them, because you keep switching tasks according to a predetermined schedule. For example, once I taught as a part-time job only one day a week, and it was a completely different experience—I had enough time to prepare for the classes, and to reflect on them after the day. But try teaching 20+ classes a week, and it’s like drowning in a river.
In software, network effects are strong. A solution people are already familiar with has an advantage. A solution integrated with other solutions you already use has an advantage (and it is easier to do the integration when both solutions are made by you). You can further lock the users in by e.g. creating a marketplace where people can sell plugins to your solution. Compared to all of this, things like “nice to use” remain merely wishes.
It could be an interesting experiment to build up this list iteratively. Like, every question you ask for the third time, the answer gets added at the bottom of the list. How long will the list get, and what will it contain?
Consider the pressures and incentives. Adding new features can help you sell the software to more users. Fixing bugs… unless the application is practically falling apart, it does not make much of a difference. After all, the bugs will only get noticed by people who already use your application, i.e. they already paid for it.
For the artificial intelligence, I assume the “killer app” will be its integration with SharePoint.
I suspect that in practice many people use the word “prioritize” to mean:
think short-term
only do legible things
remove slack
For some reason it feels like you wrote everything twice. For example...
...and there were more examples like that.
Good luck, I hope someone takes this generous offer, because it really seems like free money. But you would probably find more people with babies and needing an extra income at some other community.