[skims article]
Skim more. Got it.
PlaidX
Karma: 858
Nonsuperintelligent AI threat
The role of fun in maintaining mental health should also be noted. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
For me, the important distinction between the salmon thing and the Mohammad thing is that getting zapped when you see a picture of a salmon is a reaction that doesn’t go away through exposure. It can’t be desensitized. Drawing Mohammad, or really any form of trolling, eventually gets savvy people to change the way they react.
That’s not to say that trolling is necessarily good, but it is functionally different than what’s happening with the salmon. See this article by Clay Shirky.
If my qualia were actually those of a computer chip, then rather than feeling hot I would feel purple (or rather, some quale that no human language can describe), and if you asked me why I went back indoors even though I don’t have any particular objection to purple and the weather is not nearly severe enough to pose any serious threat to my health, I wouldn’t be able to answer you or in any way connect my qualia to my actions.
But in the simulation, you WOULD have an objection to purple, and you would call purple “hot”, right? Or is this some haywire simulation where the simulated people act normally except they’re completely baffled as to why they’re doing any of it? Either what you’re saying is incredibly stupid, or I don’t understand it. Wait, does that mean I’m in a simulation?
I will go to this as long as that libertarian guy won’t be there.
If the memetic hazard you’re referring to is the same one as mine, I recommend benzodiazepines in the short term and vipassana meditation in the long term. And just thinking about it, though clearly you’re already doing that.
I think to a large extent, the percieved threat of the thing is due to a generally neurotic perspective, common to many people here, which can twist abstract thinking into knots when given a sufficiently long and nonintuitive chain of reasoning. The trauma illuminates a serious problem with the mind rather than a serious threat from the idea.
Sorry, I couldn’t see your reply when I did my edit. I should’ve reloaded.
Alternative Voting, also known as instant runoff voting, produces results very similar to first past the post, while introducing massive headaches. You want range voting or approval voting instead.
IRV leads to 2-party domination
There are three IRV countries: Ireland (mandated in their 1937 constitution), Australia (adopted STV in the early 1900s, but in 1949 added “reweighting” to STV in their multi-winner elections, a change which does not matter for us since we are only considering single-winner elections—Australia and Ireland have both kinds of elections), and Malta. (Later note: a recent addition is Fiji, but it unfortunately then got subtracted due to a 2006 coup.)
All three became 2-party dominated in their IRV seats. And this is despite the fact that in addition to IRV single-winner elections, they all also have multi-winner STV “proportional representation” (PR) elections, and they are parliamentary rather than presidential. Both of these two factors mitigate toward having more than 2 parties (the parliamentary countries with PR essentially all have many more than 2 vibrant political parties). But despite those multiparty-genic factors, the effect of IRV in these countries has been enough to drag them back down to 2-party domination status! So given that, you can bet your bottom dollar that the USA, were it to adopt IRV but still to remain presidential and without multiwinner PR elections (i.e. wholy with single-winner elections), will definitely stay 2-party dominated.
I strongly urge anyone who cares about voting systems to poke around this site for a while, it’s very well-written.
Hmm. I wonder what situationism says about living alone and not interacting with anyone. Does it mean no influence, or feedback from your own traits, or what?
I came to the comments section to make this exact post.
Fair enough. How many IQ points would you say make a fair exchange for lesswrong’s teachings?
Oops, edits crossed in midstream. This reply made a lot more sense in conjunction with the original post as it was originally written.
Edit: Haha, yes.
Rationality vs. intelligence
Hmm… I’m certainly not SURPRISED by it, but I don’t share it, no. I see it as being a crooked sort of kludge necessitated by the idea that people are equally valuable. “people” is a very big and complicated category, and treating it as a single moral point leads to weirdness.
Practically speaking, a person gets created over an extremely protracted period. It’s not when they’re conceived, it’s not when they’re born, it’s not when they learn to speak or use the internet, it’s the entire process. In contrast, people die close to instantaneously. “creating a human life” only seems morally neutral because the “human life” you’re creating when you make a baby is extremely rudimentary.
But it’s not generally acceptable to talk about people this way, so the difference between a fetus and a piano tuner gets surreptitiously offloaded into a difference between birth and death.
Another difference that gets misplaced onto birth vs. death is the matter of discriminate vs. indiscriminate actions. If people could create people they liked as easily as they could kill people they don’t, we might see this very differently.
For the op and others here who consider preservation of human life a terminal goal: do you also consider the creation of human life a terminal goal of the same magnitude? If not, why not?
I find it very unintuitive that something’s creation could be unwarranted but its preservation vital, terminally, independent of any other considerations.
Unfortunately, none of my interests seem to involve group activities.
I have difficulty meeting people I like even on the internet, where there’s zillions of them and they can be easily sorted through.
Sure. Learning things I couldn’t learn on wikipedia, finding something good to eat, making a meaningful connection with people, enjoying myself, etc.
It’s not some existential angst, I’m just hard to please.
Meaning what?
I still have a hard time seeing how any of this is going to go somewhere useful.