dr_s

Karma: 2,268

dr_s 18 Dec 2024 15:18 UTC
2 points
3
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Review: Dr Stone

Tsukasa loses everything and has to settle for being bought off, in essence, because Senku manages to accumulate enough of a technological advantage even without any additional revivals. (The series unconvincingly says that Tsukasa’s politics were superficial and so he got what he really wanted in the end, to try to rationalize how it worked out for him. Seems like cope to me!)

The story plays a bit of a sleight of hand there with Tsukasa having the additional motivation of saving his little sister, which is a pity because they could have at least played up a bit more his conflict with Ryusui (who really seems to stand for everything he hates). But I suppose given his situation, gracefully accepting defeat is reasonably within his personality. He’s not insane or bloodthirsty. After realising he’s lost, lashing out would only mean humanity risks losing it all, while he can’t win any more anyway. Besides his whole cadre has shown itself to be either incompetent or willing to betray him (the amount of people who either switched to Senku’s side at the first sign of technology or downright backstabbed him is staggering), so maybe he’s just realised his cause never had much of a chance to begin with. He basically never found another idealist like him; he pressganged some people who had no other alternative and found a few thugs who only wanted a chance to be violent assholes. That’s not how you build a functional army.

dr_s 18 Dec 2024 11:04 UTC
7 points
1
on: Review: Breaking Free with Dr. Stone
Another Dr. Stone fan here. I will definitely vouch for this show. You have to go in being prepared to the anime-ness of it all—this is not actual science and engineering any more than your average “spokon” show represents the actual practice of whatever sport it involves. It’s not accidental that Riichiro Inagaki, the writer of the manga this show adapt, previously worked on Eyeshield 21, a hilarious and over-the-top take on American football, wherein Japanese high school teams field running backs as fast as anyone in the NFL and there’s a guy who is 2.04 m tall, weighs 130 kg, and regularly breaks his opponents’ arms by tackling them as a tactic. He’s also currently writing Trillion Game, a series that takes a similar bombastic approach to the world of start-up founding and venture capital.

The essence of this approach IMO is to represent not the actual thing, but a sort of abstracted and stylised spirit of the thing—all emotions dialled up to eleven and compressed. But at that, I think Dr. Stone really excels. It may be one of the most genuinely humanistic works of science fiction ever made. It is still far more willing to delve into the science and technology of the various devices that get McGuyver’d to fix the problem at hand than any other fictional story featuring some kind of genius protagonist I’ve ever seen, and at the same time it has deep love and respect for all aspects of human craftmanship and ingenuity. It is very adamant that for all his genius, protagonist Senku couldn’t do much without his cohort of friends who put in a lot of hard work and combine their various skills, which include both manual abilities, brute strength, and soft skills such as psychology and business sense. And it really drives at the emotional core of science, something that we don’t see often. Most fiction and popular culture puts science and emotion at odds. Dr. Stone shouts in your face that science is beautiful, AND cool, AND one of the best human achievements ever, both in itself and because it makes people’s lives better and happier. There’s a scene where a short-sighted character gets her first pair of glasses and if you can relate to that? It will make you cry.

A side note as a manga reader for this: the story is over, and I think the new season of the anime that’s starting next year will wrap things up. As it often happens with long running stories, the quality isn’t constant all throughout—there are some arcs in the middle that are somewhat less compelling than the absolutely banger beginning. But for a manga it has what I would consider a very good conclusion, which still makes it one of the most satisfying reads around in a medium that is infamous for its tendency to fizzle out with bad poorly planned endings. Another thing of note is that Boichi, the artist, is famously a classic sci-fi aficionado, and I’m sure his influence is all over this work too. Without going into spoilers, the ending and explanation for the petrification necessarily veer into high concept sci-fi, but I think it’s quite the interesting take and it should probably also find a receptive audience between the readers of this site. So, you know. Go read/watch it.

dr_s 15 Dec 2024 22:02 UTC
4 points
0
on: What are the good rationality films?
Doubt: late answer because I just watched this two days ago, but I found it a fantastic exploration of the problem of reasoning and making decisions with incomplete information and very high stakes. Part of the point being that the viewer does not get a privileged outlook and shares information with the PoV characters, meaning the movie makes you experience the problem deeply.

dr_s 15 Dec 2024 11:44 UTC
8 points
6
in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: Biological risk from the mirror world
The antibodies not being chiral dependent doesn’t mean there aren’t other fundamental links in the whole chain that leads to antibodies being deployed at all that may not be. Mostly I imagine the risk is that we have a lot of systems optimized for dealing with life of a certain chirality. They may be able to cope with the opposite chirality, but less so. COVID alone showed what happens when something far less alien but that is just barely out of distribution for our current immune defenses arrives: literally everyone in the world gets it in a matter of months, a non-insignificant percentage dies even if the pathogen itself would be no more complex or virulent than others we deal with on the daily. And COVID was easy mode. We have examples of far more apocalyptic outcomes from immune naive populations getting in contact with new pathogens.

Here we’re not even talking about somehow innocuous entities. E. Coli can and will kill you if it gets in the wrong place while your defenses are down, no mirroring necessary. Staph. Aureus is everywhere already and will eat your flesh while you still live if given the chance. The only reason why we coexist with these threats is that we are in an armed truce: they can stay within their turf, but as soon as they try and go where they don’t belong, they get terminated with maximum prejudice. Immuno-compromised people have to fear them a lot more. Imagining a version of them that is both antibiotic resistant (because I bet that’s also a consequence of chirality) and able to evade at least the first few layers of immune defenses, until somehow the system scrambles to compensate and manages to churn out a counter-measure, is terrifying enough. That the immune system may eventually cope with them doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be an apocalyptic pandemic (and worse, one that affects man and animal alike, all at once).

dr_s 25 Nov 2024 10:46 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Dumbledore's Army’s comment on: Cost, Not Sacrifice
I think it’s a very visible example that right now is particularly often brought up. I’m not saying it’s all there is to it but I think the fundamental visceral reaction to the very idea of self-mutilation is an important and often overlooked element of why some people would be put off by the concept. I actually think it’s something that makes the whole thing a lot more understandable in what it comes from than the generic “well they’re just bigoted and evil” stuff people come up with in extremely partisan arguments on the topics. These sort of psychological processes—the fact that we may first have a gut-level reaction, and only later rationalize it by constructing an ideological framework to justify why the things that repulses us are evil—are very well documented, and happen all over the place. Does not mean everyone who disagrees with me does so because of it (nor that everyone who agrees doesn’t do it!) but it would be foolish to just pretend this never happens because it sounds a bit offensive to bring up in a debate. The entire concept of rationality is based around the awareness that yeah, we’re constantly affected by cognitive biases like these, and separating the wheat from the chaff is hard work.

And by the way it’s an excellent example of the reverse too. Just like people who are not dysphoric are put off by mutilation, people who are are put off by the feeling of having something grafted onto their bodies that doesn’t belong. Which is sort of the flip side of it. Essentially we tend to have a mental image of our bodies and a strong aversion to that shape being altered or disturbed in some way (which makes all kinds of sense evolutionarily, really). Ironically enough, it’s probably via the mechanism of empathy that someone can see someone else do something to their body that feels “wrong” and cringe/be grossed out on their behalf (if you think trans issues are controversial, consider the reactions some people can have even to things like piercings in particularly sensitive places).

dr_s 22 Nov 2024 17:42 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Joe Rogero’s comment on: Cost, Not Sacrifice
Well, yes, it’s true, and obviously those things do not necessarily all have genuine infinite value. I think what this really means in practice is not that all non-fungible things have infinite value, but that because they are non-fungible, most judgements involving them are not as easy or straightforward as simple numerical comparisons. Preferences end up being expressed anyway, but just because practical needs force a square peg in a round hole doesn’t make it fit any better. I think this in practice manifests in high rates of hesitation or regret for decisions involving such things, and the general difficulty of really squaring decisions like these We can agree in one sense that several trillion dollars in charity are a much greater good than someone not having their fingers cut off, and yet we generally wouldn’t call that person “evil” for picking the latter option because we understand perfectly how to someone their own fingers might feel more valuable. If we were talking about fungible goods we’d feel very differently. Replace cutting one’s fingers with e.g. demolishing their house.

dr_s 22 Nov 2024 17:36 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Noosphere89’s comment on: What are the good rationality films?
Probabilities for physical processes are encoded in quantum wavefunctions one way or another, so I’d put that under the umbrella of “winning a staring contest with the laws of physics”, which was basically what the average Spiral Energy user did.

And then again, while optimistic, the series still does show Simon using his power responsibly and essentially renouncing it to avoid causing the Spiral Nemesis. He doesn’t just keep growing everything exponentially and decide nothing bad can ever possibly come out of it.

dr_s 21 Nov 2024 18:13 UTC
12 points
2
in reply to: Writer’s comment on: What are the good rationality films?
I think the core message of optimism is a positive one, but of course IRL we have to deal with a world whose physical laws do not in fact seem to bend endlessly under sufficient application of MANLY WARRIOR SPIRIT, and thus that forces us to be occasionally Rossiu even when we’d want to be Simon. Memeing ourselves into believing otherwise doesn’t really make it true.

dr_s 21 Nov 2024 15:41 UTC
6 points
3
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Making a conservative case for alignment
People often say that wars are foolish, and both sides would be better off if they didn’t fight. And this is standardly called “naive” by those engaging in realpolitik. Sadly, for any particular war, there’s a significant chance they’re right. Even aside from human stupidity, game theory is not so kind as to allow for peace unending.

I’m not saying obviously that ALL conflict ever is avoidable or irrational, but there are a lot that are:
1. caused by a miscommunication/misunderstanding/delusional understanding of reality;
2. rooted in a genuine competition between conflicting interests, but those interests only pertain to a handful of leaders, and most of the people actually doing the fighting really have no genuine stake in it, just false information and/or a giant coordination problem that makes it hard to tell those leaders to fuck off;
3. rooted in a genuine competition between conflicting interests between the actual people doing the fighting, but the gains are still not so large to justify the costs of the war, which have been wildly underestimated.
And I’d say that just about makes up a good 90% of all conflicts. There’s a thing where people who are embedded into specialised domains start seeing the trees (“here is the complex clockwork of cause-and-effect that made this thing happen”) and missing the forest (“if we weren’t dumb and irrational as fuck none of this would have happened in the first place”). The main point of studying past conflicts should be to distil here and there a bit of wisdom about how in fact lot of that stuff is entirely avoidable if people can just stop being absolute idiots now and then.

dr_s 21 Nov 2024 10:39 UTC
5 points
−2
on: Cost, Not Sacrifice
I think there’s one fundamental problem here IMO, which is that not everything is fungible, and thus not everything manages to actually comfortably exist on the same axis of values. Fingers are not fungible. At the current state of technology, once severed, they’re gone. In some sense, you could say, that’s a limited loss. But for you, as a human being, it may as well be infinite. You just lost something you’ll never ever have back. All the trillions and quadrillion dollars in the world wouldn’t be enough to buy it back if you regretted your choice. And thus, while in some sense its value must be limited (it’s just the fingers of one single human being after all, no? How many of those get lost every day simply because it would have been a bit more expensive to equip the workshop with a circular saw that has a proper safety stop?), in some other sense the value of your fingers to you is infinite, completely beyond money.

Bit of an aside—but I think this is part of what causes such a visceral reaction in some people to the idea of sex reassignment surgery, which then feeds into transphobic rationalizations and ideologies. The concept of genuinely wanting to get rid of a part of your body that you can’t possibly get back feels so fundamentally wrong on some level to many people, it pretty much alone for them seals the deal that you must either be insane or having been manipulated by some kind of evil outside force.

dr_s 21 Nov 2024 10:07 UTC
4 points
1
in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: What are the good rationality films?
It’s also not really a movie as much as a live recording of a stage play. But agree it’s fantastic (honestly, I’d be comfortable calling it Aladdin rational fanfiction).
Also a little silly detail I love about it in hindsight:
During the big titular musical number, all big Disney villains show on stage to make a case for themselves and why what they wanted was right—though some of their cases were quite stretched. Even amidst this collection of selfish entitled people, when Cruella De Vil shows up to say “I only wanted a coat made of puppies!” she elicits disgust and gets kicked out by her fellow villains, having crossed a line. Then later on Disney thought it was a good idea to unironically give her the Wicked treatment in “Cruella”.

dr_s 21 Nov 2024 10:05 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: What are the good rationality films?
Must be noted that all that subtext is entirely the product of the movie adaptation. The short story absolutely leaves no room for doubt, and in fact concludes on a punchline that rests on that.

dr_s 21 Nov 2024 10:02 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: What are the good rationality films?

This muddies the alienness of AI representation quite a bit.

I don’t think that’s necessarily it. For example, suppose we build some kind of potentially dangerous AGI. We’re pretty much guaranteed to put some safety measures in place to keep it under control. Suppose these measures are insufficient and the AGI manages to deceive its way out of the box—and we somehow still live to tell the tale and ask ourselves what went wrong. “You treated the AGI with mistrust, therefore it similarly behaved in a hostile manner” is guaranteed to be one of the interpretations that pop up (you already see some of this logic, people equating alignment to wanting to enslave AIs and claiming it is thus more likely to make them willing to rebel). And if you did succeed to make a truly “human” AI (not outside of the realm of possibility if you’re training it on human content/behaviour to begin with), that would be a possible explanation—after all, it’s very much what a human would do. So is the AI so human it also reacted to attempt to control it as a human would—or so inhuman it merely backstabbed us without the least hesitation? That ambiguity exists with Ava, but I also feel like it would exist in any comparable IRL situation.

Anyway “I am Mother” sounds really interesting, I need to check it out.

Only tangentially related, but one very little known movie that I enjoyed is the Korean sci-fi “Jung_E”. It’s not about “alien” AGI but rather about human brain uploads used as AGI. It’s quite depressing, along the lines of that qntm story you may have read on the same topic, but it felt like a pretty thoughtful representation of a concept that usually doesn’t make it a lot into mainstream cinema.

dr_s 20 Nov 2024 15:39 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Ape in the coat’s comment on: What are the good rationality films?
Curious—what other AI depictions are you considering/comparing to? I’m not 100% sure about what my best would be, I find good bits and pieces here and there in several movies (Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey, even the very cheesy but surprisingly not entirely unserious M3gan) but maybe not a single organic example I’d place above the rest.

dr_s 20 Nov 2024 15:32 UTC
7 points
6
in reply to: Joseph Miller’s comment on: What are the good rationality films?
“It’s like Mother of Learning, but if it was a cozy romance instead of high fantasy.”

dr_s 20 Nov 2024 12:39 UTC
2 points
0
on: Intrinsic Power-Seeking: AI Might Seek Power for Power’s Sake
This still feels like instrumentality. I guess maybe the addition is that it’s a sort of “when all you have is a hammer” situation; as in, even when the optimal strategy for a problem does not involve seeking power (assuming such a problem exists; really I’d say the question is what the optimal power seeking vs using that power trade-off is), the AI would be more liable to err on the side of seeking too much power because that just happens to be such a common successful strategy that it’s sort of biased towards it.

dr_s 19 Nov 2024 11:16 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Jonah Wilberg’s comment on: Ethical Implications of the Quantum Multiverse

If what you mean by ‘normalize everything’ is to only consider the quantum weights (which are finite as mathematical measures) and not the number of worlds, then that seems more a case of ignoring those problems rather than addressing them.

I mean that the amount of universes that is created will be created anyway, just as a consequence of time passing. So it doesn’t matter anyway. If your actions e.g. cause misery in 20% of those worlds, then the fraction is all that matters; the worlds will exist anyway, and the total amount is not something you’re affecting or controlling.

This third approach is based on the idea that ‘worlds’ are macroscopic, emergent phenomena created through decoherence (Wallace’s book contains a full mathematical treatment of this). This supports both the claim that the number of worlds is indefinite (since it depends on ultimately arbitrary mappings of macroscopic to microscopic states) and the claim that worlds are created through quantum processes (since they are macroscopically indistinguishable before decoherence occurs). My point in the post was that these two claims in combination can avoid the repugnant conclusion via the approach of focusing on the weights.

I honestly don’t think decoherence means the worlds are indefinite. I think it means they are an infinite continuum with the cardinality of the reals. Decoherence is just something you observe when you divide system from environment, in reality the Universe should have only a single, always coherent, giant wavefunction.

dr_s 18 Nov 2024 17:25 UTC
5 points
3
on: Ethical Implications of the Quantum Multiverse
I feel like branches being in fact an uncountable continuum is essentially a given, at least unless we were to fundamentally rewrite quantum mechanics to use something other than complex numbers with a cardinality of $2^{ℵ_{0}}$ . Talking about branches in terms of countable outcomes only makes sense if we group them by measurement outputs for specific discrete observables; but each of the uncountable infinity of worlds will continuously spawn uncountable infinite worlds and that’s just something you gotta deal with. If you want to do ethics over this very confusing multiverse your best bet is probably to normalize everything—“adjust for inflation”, so to speak.
I also don’t think that even if the worlds were countable (and I have seen arguments to the effect of “actually only integer numbers exist and thus if we looked close enough we’d find that all equations and fields etc are discrete-valued”) this would make a lot of difference. You making or not making the experiment does not create more branches, it just determines the outcome of branches that would already exist anyway. Assuming that we can purposefully create branches would require defining “measurement” as an actual discrete specific process, which is a much stronger claim (and I don’t think any non-objective interpretation of QM really suggests how to do that, though some gesture towards such a thing existing in theory; and objective QM theories do not admit many worlds). “By looking at specific phenomena, sentient beings create new world-lines” would certainly be A Take; if true, it would beget an ethical nightmare, the Quantum Repugnant Conclusion that we all ought to spend all our time collapsing the wavefunctions that result in the most new worlds being created.
(as a side note, have you read Quarantine, by Greg Egan? I won’t explain how precisely to avoid spoiling it, but it deals precisely with these sort of questions)

dr_s 18 Nov 2024 15:03 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: David James’s comment on: Neutrality
I don’t think this is quite the same thing. Most people actually don’t want to have to apply moral thought to every single aspect of their lives, it’s extenuating. The ones who are willing to, and try to push this mindset on others, are often singularly focused. Yes, bundling people and ideas in broad clusters is itself a common simplification we gravitate towards as a way to understand the world, but that does not prevent people from still being perfectly willing to accept some activities as fundamentally non-political.

dr_s 18 Nov 2024 14:36 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Algon’s comment on: Making a conservative case for alignment
Pretty much. It’s not “naive” if it’s literally the only option that actually does not harm everyone involved, unless of course we want to call every world leader and self-appointed foreign policy expert a blithering idiot with tunnel vision (I make no such claim a priori; ball’s in their court).

It’s important to not oversimplify things. It’s also important to not overcomplicate them. Domain experts tend to be resistant to the first kind of mental disease, but tragically prone to the second. Sometimes it really is Just That Simple, and everything else is commentary and superfluous detail.