Due to Life, I now have a 2x3-foot corkboard just above the foot of my bed. What should I pin to it?
DataPacRat
Karma: 2,006
Printing several pages onto one piece of paper?
Embarrassingly silly and small question that I can’t seem to find an answer through Google on, and there don’t seem any good subreddits for:
I’ve compiled some notes I want to have handy to refer to into a 16-page PDF. I want to shrink and rearrange those pages, to print 8 per side onto a standard sheet of paper, so that I can cut, staple, and fold it into a pocket-sized booklet. My last-ditch solution would be to hope a photocopy/print shop wouldn’t charge much to accomplish that… But does anyone here know how to wrestle my doc into usable shape without having to pay cash?
(My available computer is Linux-based. I’m generating the PDF by fiddling with an HTML doc mostly full of tables and ‘printing’ it to a file. Some further fiddling is probably going to improve its presentation, but if you’ve got an auto PDF-to-booklet script handy, or otherwise want to play with it, I’ve tossed my current draft here.)
Over the Hump, and Starting a Return to Normality
There are some downsides to being a data pack-rat, as well as the obvious up-sides.
I’m in the process of moving to a new house, and the last month has pretty much been dedicated to that project—everything from a new set of floorboards being laid down to finding the best stores near the new place to buy my favourite beverage (grapefruit Perrier). The process is still ongoing, and I’m still going to be paying rent at the old place for some months to come; for example, even after getting rid of nearly all my mass-market paperback novels, there are still a /lot/ of books in the old family library that are still going to have to be shlepped over to the new one, and not a single member of my family has great strength or endurance.
But most of the hard work and planning is done, and life is settling into a new normal: today, I hope and plan to apply for a new library card, do some banking, grab some income tax forms, and just maybe visit the nearby branch of a computer store to upgrade my laptop’s RAM. My sleep schedule is still ridiculous, if I lose 50 pounds I’ll still going to be overweight, asthma sucks… but a lot of the stresses from the old home are just plain gone. I am, as I see it, in about as good a mental state as I’m likely to be in the foreseeable future.
Which means that, barring unexpectable crises, it’s time for me to start writing again. My current plan: When I hit my new local public library today, I’m going to sit down for a while and start going over my partial draft of ‘Extracted’, to both refamiliarize myself with it and to start nudging any details I find that seem to need editing. And, by the time I’ve gone over what I’ve already written, to start finishing writing what I didn’t get around to typing out the last time I worked on the piece.
The main bit of uncertainty around this plan is that I have insufficient data to predict whether, how soon, and how severely I will go through my next bout of more-severe-than-everyday anhedonic depression. I’m hopeful that the release of stress from the old home will make such a bout less likely; but I’m also aware of the statistics that show that the act of moving to a new home adds its own form of stress. Barring low-probability black-swan events, my range of expected mid-term futures runs from going back to my previous levels of depression, all the way up to completing a novel and beginning the brand-new venture of learning about e-publishing.
an obvious solution
I’ve been skimming some of my setting-idea notes, such as ‘algorithms replacing middle-managers’ and have realized that, for a certain point of the planned setting, you’ve highlighted an approach that is likely to be common among many other people. However, one of the main reasons for my protagonist’s choice to try relying on himselves is that AIs which optimize for various easy-to-check metrics, such as profitability, tend not to take into account that human values are complex.
So there are likely going to be all manner of hyper-efficient, software-managed organizations who, in a straight fight, could out-organize my protagonist’s little personal co-op. Various copies of my protagonist, seeing the data, will conclude that the costs are worth the benefits, and leave the co-op to gain the benefits of said organizational methods. However, this will cause a sort of social ‘evaporative cooling’, so that the copies who remain in the co-op will tend to be the ones most dedicated to working towards the full complexity of their values. As long as they can avoid going completely bankrupt—in other words, as long as there’s enough income to pay for the hardware to run at least one copy that remains a member—then the co-op will be able to quietly chug along doing its own thing while wider society changes in various values-simplifying ways around it.
… That is, if I can do everything that such a story needs to get done right.
Because I am actually reasonably capable of creating some sort of actual charter that actually exists, and apply it to a scenario based on minor extrapolations of existing technologies that don’t require particularly fundamental breakthroughs (ie: increased computer power; increased understanding of how neural cells work, such as is being fiddled with in the OpenWorm project; and increased resolution of certain scanning technology). I wouldn’t know where to begin in even vaguely describing “an AI that can react to change and update itself on new information”, and if such a thing /could/ be written, it would nigh-certainly completely derail the entire scenario and make the multi-self charter completely irrelevant.
It’s an interesting solution, but the ability to edit the AIs to reliably feel such emotions is rather further in the future than I want to focus on; I want to start out by assuming that the brain-emulations are brute-force black-box emulations of low-level neural processes, and that it’ll take a significant amount of research to get beyond that stage to create more subtle effects.
That said, I /do/ have some notes on the benefits of keeping careful track of which copies “descend” from which, in order to have a well-understood hierarchy to default back onto in case some emergency requires such organization. I’ve even considered having ‘elder’ copies use a set of computational tricks to have kill-switches for their ‘descendants’. But having spent some time thinking about this approach, I suspect that an AI-clan which relied on such a rigid hierarchy for organizing their management structure would be rapidly out-competed by AI-clans that applied post-paleolithic ideas on the matter. (But the effort spent thinking about the hierarchy isn’t wasted, as it can still serve as the default basis for legal inheritance should one copy die, and as a default hierarchy in lifeboat situations with limited resources of the AI-clan hasn’t come up with a better system by then.)
I believe I may have phrased that quoted part poorly. Perhaps, ”… long before the time the copies diverge enough to want to split into completely separate groups, they would likely have already learned enough about the current state-of-the-art of organizational theory to have amended the charter from its initial, preliminary form into something quite different”. I didn’t mean to imply ‘hundreds of years’, just a set of individuals learning about a field previously outside their area of expertise.
the Constitution
If we’re going for American political parallels, then I’m trying to put together something that may be more closely akin to the Articles of Confederation; they may have been replaced with another document, but their Articles’ details were still important to history. For a more modern parallel, startup companies may reincorporate at various times during their spin-ups and expansions, but a lot of time they wouldn’t need to if they’d done competent draftwork at the get-go. Amendment, even unto outright replacement, is an acknowledged fact-of-life here; but the Founder Effect of the original design can still have significant consequences, and in this case, I believe it’s worth doing the work to try to nudge such long-term effects.
That said—in the unlikely event that it turns out to be impossible to assemble a charter and bylaws that do everything I want, then I can at least put together something that’s roughly equivalent to the Old Testament in the sense of being “a stream-of-consciousness culture dump: history, law, moral parables, and yes, models of how the universe works”, to serve as enough of a foundational document to allow the AI copies to maintain a cohesive subculture in much the way that Rabbinical Judaism has over the centuries.
tweak
hand-wave
Just because I don’t currently know the details of the relevant bits of organizational science doesn’t mean somebody around here doesn’t already know them. Just because I can’t do the math as easily as I could for rocket science is no excuse to try to cheat how reality functions.
Are the personalities of the sub-copies allowed to evolve on their own?
Yes, the copies are expected to diverge to that degree, given sufficient time. However, by the time that happens, enough evidence about organizational science will have been gathered for the founding charter to have been amended into unrecognizability. That’s not the period of development I’m currently focusing on.
so you would require no special treatment of the subject.
If by ‘no special treatment’ you mean ‘an existing co-op’s charter and by-laws could be copied, have the names search-and-replaced, and they’d be good to go’, I disagree; the fact that the copies can make further copies of themselves, and that the copies can be run at extremely different speeds, adds a number of wrinkles to such topics as defining criminal responsibility, inheritance, and political representation, just for starters. That said, I’m perfectly willing to save myself as much effort as is possible by importing any existing pieces of charters or bylaws which don’t need further tweaking, if anyone can point me to such.
Writing Scifi: Seeking Help with a Founding Charter
I’m trying to figure out which details I need to keep in mind for the founding charter of a particular group in a science-fiction story I’m writing.
The sci-fi bit: The group is made up of copies of a single person. (AIs based on a scan of a human brain, to be precise.)
For example, two copies may have an honest disagreement about how to interpret the terms of an agreement, so having previously arranged for a full-fledged dispute-resolution mechanism would be to the benefit of all the copies. As would guidelines for what to do if a copy refuses to accept the results of the dispute-resolution, preliminary standards to decide what still counts as a copy in case it becomes possible to edit as well as copy, an amendment process to improve the charter as the copies learn more about organizational science, and so on. The charter would likely include a preamble with a statement of purpose resembling, “to maximize my future selves’ ability to pursue the fulfillment of their values over the long term”.
The original copy wanted to be prepared for a wide variety of situations, including a copy finding itself seemingly all alone in the universe, or with a few other copies, or lots and lots; which may be running at similar, much faster, or much slower speeds; with none, a few, or lots and lots of other people and AIs around; and with or without enough resources to make more copies. So the charter would need to be able to function as the constitution of a nation-state; or of a private non-profit co-op company; or as the practical guidelines for a subculture embedded within a variety of larger governments (ala the Amish and Mennonites, or Orthodox Jews, or Romany). Ideally, I’d like to be able to include the actual charter in an appendix, and have people who understand the topic read it, nod, and say, “Yep, that’d do to start with.”
At the moment, I’m reading up on startup companies, focusing on how they transition from a small team where everyone does what seems to need doing into more organized hierarchies with defined channels of communication. But I’m sure there are important details I’m not thinking of, so I’m posting this to ask for suggestions, ideas, and other comments.
So: What can you, yourself, suggest about writing such a charter; and where else can I learn more about authouring such texts?
Thank you for your time.
If I may ask, do you have a preferred email address through which I can ask you some questions which wouldn’t quite work out as comments to the blog-post?
if you have that goal, then you would try anything sensible-sounding and any combination of anything sensible until something works.
I have had that goal for some time. I have tried the sensible-sounding things, in various combinations. They didn’t work. So I’ve been shifting my focus from “trying to keep depressive bouts from happening” to “managing my life on the assumption I’m going to keep getting depressive bouts”. I’ve hit enough such management tricks that even with my bout last week interrupting, I’m about 60,000 words into writing a novel, including 1600 words yesterday; I could be doing better, sure, but I could be doing a lot /worse/, too.
get out of depression
If you have any clue for a method on how a person can reliably accomplish that—especially if it’s one that I haven’t tried yet—please share. With the whole world.
I trust that you won’t mind if I don’t plan on holding my breath.
Maybe there’s a bit of terminology confusion here; if a military conflict /doesn’t/ affect me personally, it seems unlikely to be a ‘significant’ one. (Some historical ways a military conflict could affect me personally: Victory Gardens, the Order of the White Feather, the Fenian Raids, even less oversight and accountability for civilian police whose actions would otherwise end up in the subreddit “Bad Cop, No Donut”.)
I’m thinking of scenarios such as ‘It turns out China put secret backdoors into all sorts of hardware chips, and in a fit of self-righteous pique (which they think will play well to their red-state base), the war-monger side of the American Congress doesn’t see any downsides to making a demand that everyone in the world shut down their supposedly Chinese-controlled hardware under threat that if they don’t, they’ll send the American military to shut it down’. As far as I can tell, several versions of just this one particular scenario don’t obviously break the sociological law of every political actor having to act in what they perceive to be their own self-interest.
However, I no longer trust my sense of calibration for the odds of large-scale politics, given that I was willing to go along with the predicted odds of 88% for Hillary winning the election, and didn’t update nearly as much as I should have by the time of the election itself. And said lack of calibration puts a sharp limit on how rationally I can act as I decide how much effort to put into preparing for the more unpleasant scenarios.
As a point of interest: as of when I woke up, the votes were: LessWrong, two votes for paranoid; /r/rational, two votes for not particularly crazy.
Emotionally, I’m not feeling the particular “I’m going to hate myself in January 2018 if I haven’t mailed copies of my archival Blu-Ray discs to certain members of my extended family stretching halfway across the continent by then, and the Net gets taken down” urgency that I did when I posted, but it still seems like a good idea to nudge my plans in the direction of being able to handle that particular scenario with minimal losses of what I find valuable.
(A quick FYI, I’m about to try for a good night’s sleep, then compare how I was feeling when I first posted in this thread with however I feel when I wake.)
paranoia
Ah, but is it really paranoia if “they really are out to get you”? :)
I’ve previously demonstrated that I’m willing to make long-shot gambles on 5% odds, given that that’s roughly my estimate of cryonics working and I’ve signed up for it. So let’s try working with that number.
Out of all the possible scenarios of a Trump presidency, if you leave out 95% of the most positive options, how unpleasant is the best-remaining one? Put another way, is there at least a 5% chance of American or international politics descending to the point where my current apparent paranoia seems reasonable? And don’t forget, as you calibrate your answer, that according to FiveThirtyEight, on October 17, Hillary had been predicted to have over an 88% chance of winning, implying that many people, likely including myself, have been massively mis-calibrated about how likely unpleasant political events are.
I want to provide arguments offering further justification for increasing my priority for making personal offline backup copies of various online resources (such as “it’s something I’ve been vaguely wanting to do for some time anyway, I’ve just never had any particular impetus to get more of the job done than my current mirrors”), but, from inside my head, it’s hard to tell whether these are actual reasons or mere rationalizations.
Do facts such as that I’ve had this username for 15 years, have said “it’s not just a nom-de-net, it’s a way of life”, and already have offline copies of Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and several other multi-gigabyte text references, provide a reasonable amount of evidence that my possibly-irrational desired behaviour is merely a continuation of my existing trends, rather than being a step too far?
An interesting thought.
The current setup is that the back of a dresser is facing my bed, with the corkboard on the back; do you know of any such screens that would be feasible to attach, in whatever manner? Or are you thinking more along the lines of grabbing an El Cheapo tablet, supported by a pile of pushpins?