manifold.markets/Sinclair
Sinclair Chen
Karma: 592
interesting. what if she has her memories and some abstract theory of what she is, and that theory is about as accurate as anyone else’s theory, but her experiences are not very vivid at all. she’s just going through the motions running on autopilot all the time—like when people get in a kind of trance while driving.
You are definitely right about tradeoff of my direct sensory experience vs other things my brain could be doing like calculation or imagination. I hope with practice or clever tool use I will get better at something like doing multiple modes at once, task switching faster between modes, or having a more accurate yet more compressed integrated gestalt self.
tbh, my hidden motivation for writing this is that I find it grating when people say we shouldn’t care how we treat AI because it isn’t conscious. this logic rests on the assumption that consciousness == moral value.
if tomorrow you found out that your mom has stopped experiencing the internal felt sense of “I”, would you stop loving her? would you grieve as if she were dead or comatose?
I kinda feel like I literally have more subjective experience after experiencing ego death/rebirth. I suspect that humans vary quite a lot in how often they are conscious, and to what degree. And if you believe, as I do, that consciousness is ultimately algorithmic in nature (like, in the “surfing uncertainty” predictive processing view, that it is a human-modeling thing which models itself to transmit prediction-actions) it would not be crazy for it to be a kind of mental motion which sometimes we do more or less of, and which some people lack entirely.
I don’t draw any moral conclusions about this because I don’t ethically value people or things in proportion to how conscious they are. I love the people I love, I’m certainly happy they are alive, and I would be happier for them to be more alive, but this is not why I love them.
Uh, there are minds. I think you and I both agree on this. Not really sure what the “what if no one existed” thought experiment is supposed to gesture at. I am very happy that I exist and that I experience things. I agree that if I didn’t exist then I wouldn’t care about things
I think your method double counts the utility. In the absurd case, if I care about you and you care about me, and I care about you caring about me caring about you… then two people who like each other enough have infinite value. unless the repeating sum converges. How likely is the converging sum exactly right such that a selfish person should love all humans equally? Also even if it was balanced, if two well-connected socialites in latin america break up then this would significantly change the moral calculus for millions of people!
Being real for a moment, I think my friends (degree 1) are happier if I am friends with their friends (degree 2), want us to be at least on good terms, and would be sad if I fought with them. But my friends don’t care that much how I feel about the friends of their friends (degree 3)
we completely dominate dogs. society treat them well because enough humans love dogs.
I do think that cooperation between people is the origin of religion, and its moral rulesets which create tiny little societies that can hunt stags.
I definitely think that if I was not conscious then I would not coherently want things. But that conscious minds are the only things that can truly care, does not mean that conscious minds are the only things we should terminally care about.
The close circle composition isn’t enough to justify Singerian altruism from egoist assumptions, because of the value falloff. With each degree of connection, I love the stranger less.
I didn’t use the word “ethics” in my comment, so are you making a definitional statement, to distinguish between [universal value system] and [subjective value system] or just authoritatively saying that I’m wrong?
Are you claiming moral realism? I don’t really believe that. If “ethics” is global, why should I care about “ethics”? Sorry if that sounds callous, I do actually care about the world, just trying to pin down what you mean.
Musk met with Iran ambassador. maybe the market thinks they cut a deal?
why do people equate conciousness & sentience with moral patienthood? your close circle is not more conscious or more sentient than people far away, but you care about your close circle more anyways. unless you are SBF or ghandi
you can get more of this from twitter btw
I just ran a party where everyone was required to wear earplugs. I think this did effectively cap the max size of groups at 5 people, past which people tend to split into mini conversations. People say the initial silence feels a bit odd though. I’m definitely going to try this more
I am convinced if only the Cult of Reason had not chopped off the head of Lavoisier, France woulda industrialized first. They got to clockwork and machining first! (Unless you count the antikythera mechanism of the Ancient Greeks.) Also it’s really sad how France has treated—and continues to treat—its colonies. Compared to the British they were much worse at building infrastructure and and setting up institutions. This is why no one takes French seriously. Except Japan.
lol at the guy in the video being nostalgic for the Islamic Golden Age while saying French speakers have no science. they did and they squandard it, just like Arabic speakers.
After the Norman conquest of England, “beef”, derived from the French word for cow, started to refer to the meat of the cow in the context of a meal. This is because the nobles spoke French. You see the same etymological distinction in pork/pig, venison/deer, and mutton/sheep.
The addition of new words from foreign languages into English continues to happen all the time still. This happens by default. (I should note that sometimes when populations which speak different languages live side by side they form a more simplified combination language called a pidgin/creole rather than any one of them winning out.)
I think violence is bad. If you just teach kids in a language gives them job access to the world economy, their more obscure language will get replaced in a few generations.
My advice to multinational corporations is to run their offices in English or Chinese (pick one). My advice to developing nations is to pick as their official language (like in legal texts and taught in schools) one of the six UN languages. My advice to new parents anywhere is to expose your toddlers to a ton of media in either English or Chinese and to get them into a peer group that speaks that language (like by picking their school). maybe even Spanish if you want to make a high variance bet on Mexico/South-America—Except-Brazil.
I’m sorry but Hindi, Bengali, Urdu speakers should learn English. Portuguese speakers should learn Spanish. Japanese punches above its weight in fraction of global GDP and number of webpages, but I nonetheless think its speakers should continue the slow Englishification of Japanese that is already happening. Much of Africa already can speak French or English but especially for the people who don’t it’s probably worth making the leap to Chinese.
Also, it would be nice if the non-east-asian languages could coalesce on the latin alphabet as much as possible. Also also it would be nice if when the CCP gets around to Simplified Chinese 2.0 they reform the pronunciation component of the characters to follow a consistent schema, perhaps taken by Hangul. the semantic components should probably be kept the same, except to make the symbols more pictographic.
Oh, and as English speakers, we should deliberately try to nudge it in an easier-to-learn direction.
Avoid using words that are too long, be consistent in meaning, and perhaps deliberately misspell words the way they are said and misspeak words the way they are written. And use emojis and emoticons—they are not literally universally understood tokens but they are far more widely understood than any other token.
I cannot actually do grand sweeping global language changes but I can do this at least.
Today we have a lot of improved reactor designs that are much further from dual use, much more resistant to catastrophic failure, much easier to scale to smaller size, and that produce much less waste, but never allowed ourselves to build them.
I agree on the resistance to failure and less waste production, but disagree on dual use.
Thorium produces uranium-233 which can be used for nuclear reactions. Unlike uranium 235 based energy reactors, thorium produces more uranium-233 than it consumes in the course of producing energy. With thorium reactors, all energy reactors will be producing weapons grade nuclear material. This may be less efficient than traditional reactors dedicated to making nuclear weapons material, but converting a thorium energy plant from energy to weapons making is more trivial.
And if as you say these new reactors design are more simple and small, the capital costs will be much lower, and since thorium is abundant the operational costs are much lower, so the plants will be more spread out geographically and new nations will get it. Overall the headache to global intelligence agencies is much higher.
I also think beyond these specific objections, the dual-use nature nuclear is “overdetermined”. There’s an amusing part of the interview where Thiel points out that the history of industrial advancement was moving from energy sources that take up more space to ones that take up less, from wood to coal to oil to nuclear. and now we’re moving back to natural gas which takes up more space and solar panels that take up a lot of land. Anyways, the atom fundamentally has a lot of energy in it, . but massive amounts of energy in a small space is easy to turn into large explosions. The thing that makes nuclear attractive is the same thing that makes it dangerous. There’s been incredible technical progress in preventing nuclear accidents but preventing nuclear weapons requires geopolitical solutions.
Language is a border on culture, like a big wall.
Within a big language like English, people naturally invent new words when trying to reach for concepts they can not yet say, and this creates a tiny fence around a subculture. you can step over it, but the taller the fence the more the subculture diffs the broader culture.
I say this to say there is any value at all in having different communication protocols in the world at all. From an optimalist perspective you’d want everyone to have the same, because communication leads to truth right? but humans aren’t immune to propaganda; listening is not a free action. If the world spoke the same words tomorrow, people would immediately fight and get polarized, and diverge as they all tried to carve away a tiny little society that’s safe and better by their values.
But I think such a society is much better than the one we currently have. Large borders seem worse than a polycentric world where people can move between subcultures and pick up the best parts. Freedom of movement allows people to leave cultures worse for them and enter cultures that are better.
Anyways, besides that small caveat, at this point in society we should if anything be actively trying to replace and assimilate the small languages rather than preserve them.
this is an incredible insight! from this I think we can design better nightclublike social spaces for people who don’t like loud sounds (such as people in this community with signal processing issues due to autism).
One idea I have is to do it in the digital. like, VR chat silent nightclub where the sound falloff is super high. (perhaps this exists?) Or a 2D top down equivalent. I will note that Gather Town is backwards—the sound radius is so large that there is still lots of lemurs, but at the same time you can’t read people’s body language from across the room—and instead there needs to be an emotive radius from webcam / face-tracking needs to be larger than the sound radius. Or you can have a trad UI with “rooms” of very small size that you have to join to talk. tricky to get that kind of app right though since irl there’s a fluid boundary between in and out of a convo and a binary demarcation would be subtly unpleasant.
Another idea is to find alternative ways to sound isolate in meatspace. Other people have talked about architectural approaches like in Lighthaven. Or imagine a party where everyone had to wear earplugs. sound falls off with the square of distance and you can calculate out how many decibles you need to deafen everyone by to get the group sizes you want. Or a party with a rule that you have to plug your ears when you aren’t actively in a conversation.
Or you could lay out some hula hoops with space between them and the rule is you can only talk within the hula hoop with other people in it, and you can’t listen in on someone else’s hula hoop convo. have to plug your ears as you walk around. Better get real comfortable with your friends! Maybe secretly you can move the hoops around to combine into bigger groups if you are really motivated. Or with way more effort, you could similarly do a bed fort building competition.
These are very cheap experiments!
I think a restaurant where you paid for time, if the food was nothing special, would quickly turn into a coworking space. Maybe it would be more open-office and more amenable to creative, conversational, interpersonal work rather than laptop work. You probably want it to be a cafe—or at least look like a cafe from the outside in signage / branding; you may want architectural sound dampening like a denny’s booth. You could sell pre-packaged food and sodas—it isn’t what they’re here for. Or you could even sell or rent activities like coloring books, simple social tabletop games, small toys, lockpicking practice locks, tiny marshmallow candle smore sets, and so on.
I think the concept of true love is too confused to be worth rescuing. There’s a fairytale conception of it being idyllic and perfect. There’s the romcom conception of it happening with strangers in unexpected circumstances. And there’s many many people’s personal experience of romance, which they are motivated to describe as true or not true depending on whether they want to keep the relationship or move past it.
Perhaps the definition which you give the phrase is what the meaning ought to be from the plain meaning of the words individually, but it won’t be how most people use the term or what they think you mean when they hear it. Your sense of true love does seem like a fine thing to aim for. I would have liked this post if it were a tweet.
Other lies people believe about romantic/relationship love: that it can’t be induced or designed. that it can’t be stopped. that it is fundamentally irrational. that it is not made of atoms. that all is fair for it. that it is always good.
(I’m too lazy to type up my whole model of love right now, but as a pointer, search academic papers for the connection between limerence and OCD)
this is too harsh. love is a good feeling actually. it is something that many people deeply and truly want.
it is good to create mental frameworks around common human desires which are congruent with a philosophy of truthseeking.