In most cases, signing up for cryonics and signing up as an organ donor are not mutually exclusive. The manner of death most suited to organ donation (rapid brain death with (parts of) the body still in good condition, generally caused by head trauma) is not well suited to cryonic preservation. You’d probably need a directive in case the two do conflict, but such a conflict is unlikely.
Alternatively, neuropreservation can, at least is theory, occur with organ donation.
The point of the reproductive analysis is that it explains the status seeking and attention seeking—whilst also explaining the fees paid for IVF treatments and why ladies like to keep cute puppies. It is a deeper, better theory—with firm foundations in biology.
Evolutionary analysis can if used properly. But evolutionary analysis is properly identifying adaptations, not:
people’s desires should be nailed down as hard as possible to those things that lead to raising good quality babies.
As ever, both stories are studies in irrelevancy and emotional appeal.
Which probably reflects a good bit of what’s wrong with the criminal justice system.
Though unscientific scientific testimony is also a serious problem, apparently also seen in this case.
It may have helped if you’d explained yourself to onlookers in English, or simply asked in English (given Thomas’s apparent reasonable fluency).
I disagree with the downvotes, though.
Calling it an “infection” or a “malfunction” implicitly judges the behavior. That’s your own bias talking.
The fact that someone desires something because of a meme instead of a gene (to oversimplify things; both are always in play) does not make the desire any less real or any less worthy.
A solely status-based analysis misses things, just as a solely reproductive analysis misses things. The point is that you can’t nail desires down to simply “making good babies” or “being high status” or “having lots of sex”; any or all of these may be true desires in a given person.
Almost 7 billion humans shows how well this theory works.
And yet subreplacement fertility in a number of rich countries (the very place where people have copious resources) points to a serious flaw. It’s apparent that many people aren’t having babies.
People are adaptation executors, not fitness maximizers.
For a highly simplified example, people like sex. In the ancestral environment sex would lead to babies. But the development of condoms, hormonal birth control, etc, has short-circuited this connection. The tasks of caring for a baby (which are evolutionarily programmed) interfere with sex. Thus, you have people forgoing babies in order to have more sex.
Of course, in the real world, people care about status, food, etc, as well as sex. All those things may have been linked to reproduction in the environment where we evolved, but the connection is far weaker with modern technology. Thus, people prefer other things to reproduction.
Strongly unFriendly AI (the kind that tortures you eternally, rather than kills you and uses your matter to make paperclips) would be about as difficult to create as Friendly AI. And since few people would try to create one, I don’t think it’s a likely future.
Keep in mind selection bias. The pool of people who would unschool their children is systematically different from the general population. Aspects of child-rearing unrelated to schooling (at least conventional schooling) and/or genetics probably played a role in determining the adult personality of their children.
This solves nothing. If we knew the failure mode exactly, we could forbid it explicitly, rather than resort to some automatic self-destruct system. We, as humans, do not know exactly what the AI will do to become Unfriendly; that’s a key point to understand. Since we don’t know the failure mode, we can’t design a superstition to stop it, anymore than we can outright prohibit it.
This is, in fact, worse than explicit rules. It requires the AI to actively want to do something undesirable, instead of it occurring as a side effect.
Indeed. I’m not saying the karma system is a bad thing.
Also, the karma system adds an additional barrier, at least in my mind. Knowing that your comment is going to be explicitly judged and your score added to a “permanent record” can be intimidating.
If you haven’t already, do check out Eby’s Instant Irresistible Motivation video for learning how to create positive motivation.
Interesting. In fact, it seems to mesh with the process I’ve successfully used to do things like cleaning my desk.
Unfortunately, many of the tasks I have to do don’t lend themselves to the visualization in step 1. How does one visualize having studied for an exam, or completed an exercise routine?
technology changes the game by making it easier to commit systematic mass murder.
Not to mention the simple expedient of having more people around.
That’s not my point. My point is that Gall’s law is unfalsifiable by anything short of Omega converting its entire light cone into computronium/utilium in a single, plank-time step.
Edit: Not to say that Gall’s Law can’t be useful to keep in mind during engineering design.
Deleated as a repeat.
Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.
WIlliam Thomson, Lord Kelvin
Suppose a hyperintelligent alien race did build a space shuttle equivalent as their first space-capable craft, and then went on to build interplanetary and interstellar craft.
Alien 1: The [interstellar craft, driven by multiple methods of propulsion and myriad components] disproves Gall’s Law.
Alien 2: Not at all. [Craft] is a simple extension of well-developed principles like the space shuttle and the light sail.
You can simply define a “working simple system” as whatever you can make work, making that a pure tautology.
You should probably make an explicit karma balance post for this.
You weren’t just presenting evidence. You were making an argument. Some people believed that you were engaged in motivated reasoning and/or privileging the hypothesis.
Please discuss the merits of the argument in the original thread, if desired. I’d prefer to keep the discussions of the merits of the argument and the reactions to it separate.
Not that it isn’t interesting, but it seems confused, and somewhat trivial.
Trivial, because it basically says: Keep in mind that the map is not the territory applies even if the map is a scientific model. A good thing to keep in mind, nevertheless.
But in the details, you seem to misunderstand some of the problems “mathematics appears to have perfect conformity with reality” is, as Vladmir Nesov points out, exactly backwards. Mathematics qua mathematics has no relation to reality, and (properly) makes no claim as to reflections of reality. Your linked article, on the surface, is perfectly in line with classical incentive economics: remembering to take meds is costly, so some people don’t do it. Give an incentive, and more people will do it. Not that there aren’t important flaws in the perfect rationality assumption, and some of them show up beneath the surface of that behavior. But show it to computer programmed to do classical economics, and it will happily calculate marginal costs of remembering to take drugs, etc.
Further, you seem to miss some of the important roots of the problem. Economics is not the only discipline where good models are lacking (turbulent flow comes to mind). But it’s easy to create a turbulent flow in a laboratory. So, is it the difficulty of experiments that cause problems, or the complexity of the phenomenon?
Or is it lack of self-awareness or honesty? Do economists imagine they understand the economy better than aeronautical engineers imagine they understand flow? And if so, why?