Story prompt: overengineered boiler bootstraps self to sentience, discovers climate change, goes on strike
greylag
Karma: 237
“Pareto efficiency“ - Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is an economic state where resources cannot be reallocated to make one individual better off without making at least one individual worse off (from https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pareto-efficiency.asp)
and “arms race”, if that counts as a nicer way, or some allusion to the Red Queen (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen%27s_race)
Epistemic status: shitpost
Second-Order selection against My Immortal
If you think we‘ve got too much Culture War, vote for people/policies/things that in your opinion will diminish the Culture War (give or take other values, obviously).
(This is a consequentialist argument)
(Epistemic status: earworm)
No-one will have the endurance to claim on his insurance / Lloyd’s of London will be loaded when they go! - Tom Lehrer, “We will all go together when we go”
I’ve yet to delve into it, but RethinkX—a think tank, doubtless with an axe to grind—take similar ingredients and produce a result pointing in the opposite direction: RE is cheap, storage is relatively expensive, so the optimal solution is RE overcapacity with storage filling the gap that remains, and volatile energy prices, often very low, sometimes quite high. A large gas- or coal-fired power plant is not at all optimised for this market, and they don’t advise you to own one. See, for example: https://www.rethinkx.com/energy-lcoe.
I think there are very many moving parts here when dealing with RE intermittency. Grid-scale storage is the obvious one, but there’s also vehicle-to-grid, and all kinds of thermal storage at the point of use (since providing heat and cooling is a major use of electricity, and thermal storage can be cheaper than storing electricity as electricity). Add to that all the principal-agent problems (the landlord owns the HVAC, and the tenant has to grit their teeth and pay for it) and time lags (how long does it take to build a 2GW power plant?)…
The need for backup dispatchable power means that even if RE were free, it would still not be cheaper, because you still have to have the backup dispatchable power stations
This is somewhat true for the capital cost of the backup/dispatchable plant, but not the operating cost, which includes fuel, and any notion of the cost of the emissions (whether via carbon tax, cap and trade, or notional non–financial cost) (and, as far as AGW is concerned, the emissions are the important factor here).
See also: “Preachers who are not believers“ (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/147470491000800113)
GDP is more of a measure of economic activity than value
Upvoting for this insight.
(Epistemic status: quoting 80s action movie, metaphor)
”Welcome to the party, pal!”
Whales, to use the metaphor used by casinos.
Another aspect: if you built software intended to deliberate on people’s needs and problems and then formulate plans and collect volunteers, the result would look fairly thoroughly not like Facebook. Any system for collating, corralling and organising different opinions and evidence would, also, look not at all like Facebook. You might end up with an argument map[1], or some “garden and the stream”[2] mix of dialogue and accumulated wisdom.
TL;DR: social software intended to avoid or ameliorate the problems we see with Facebook might function very little like Facebook does.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_map
[2] https://hapgood.us/2015/10/17/the-garden-and-the-stream-a-technopastoral/
The way echo chambers work seems to be popularly mis-explained.
How’s it’s explained: everyone you encounter agrees with you
How it actually works: everyone you encounter who you disagree with appears to be insane or evil. Next time you encounter someone who disagrees with you, you expect them to be insane or evil, causing you to act in a way that seems to them to be insane or evil. Iterate.
(Epistemic status: guesswork)
Hypothesis: more addictive may well not actually be more profitable. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if social media engagement was Pareto-distributed, with the most active people quite possibly not the most lucrative customers for advertisers to advertise to. This is immaterial if effectiveness-of-advertising is Goodharted into ”page impressions”, but a pile of Nash Equilibria which only works because multiple parties are Goodharting against noisy proxies can collapse abruptly.
Whether or not this case has merit, the systematic censorship thing seems real to me… when the antivaxxers have a point, the mainstream isn’t allowed to admit it
”Social media trying to tackle disinformation with blunt instruments and causing collateral damage” seems to me very much true. Censorship of information about side-effects…? Well, it seems like “the covid vaccine makes you feel terrible 24-48 hours afterwards for some people” seems like common knowledge; I’m sure I’ve been advised after the flu vaccine to stay still & nearby for ten minutes to check I don’t react badly to it. More pointedly, the low-but-detectable-risk-of-blood-clots problems with the adenovirus vaccines resulted in rollout of those vaccines being paused/delayed by some countries for certain demographic groups, and while there was controversy about what was justified (pause vaccine rollout? Only give those vaccines to older people at less risk of blood clots?), “systematic censorship” is not an accurate description of what was happening.
I can’t say he just “grew out of it” because a lot of evil people remain evil as adults
”They grew out of it” isn’t invalidated as a phenomenon because it’s success rate is less than 100%!
“They grew out of it” does appear to be what happens to a lot of high-school bullies, from conventional wisdom & personal experience. I believe many petty criminals, also, grow out of it—opportunistic crimes are primarily a young man’s game.
Nominate “statisticians’ duck hunt”, after this joke
Three statisticians go duck hunting. They see a duck and the first statistician shoots, hitting two feet to the left of the duck. The second statistician shoots, hitting two feet to the right of the duck. The third statistician leaps up in joy, yelling, “We got it!”
Guess: people are craving normalcy, and aren’t doing the math.
(Epistemic status: lame pun)
I don’t believe 1970 had significant deployment of … EDM, or probably a bunch of other process I’m forgetting about
It was called “disco” in the 70s
(Epistemic status: shitpost)
Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, but with a large number of trained sheep