See if I can free up more time and energy.
stcredzero
Karma: 601
The administrative admin of the group I was working with told me something that started my habit of brushing and flossing: “It’s simple. You only have to floss between the teeth you want to keep.” This evokes lots of images for me.
That was 15 years ago, and my habit is still strong to this day.
Giving up porn for an entire month.
True story. Some years back, I was having trouble sleeping and decided I was getting too much light in the mornings. So I measured my bedroom windows, which were all different, odd widths, and went to Lowe’s where they sell nicely opaque vinyl blinds. So I pick out the blinds I want, and go to the cutting machine and press the button to summon store help. The cutting machine turned the blinds, which were cut by a blade which screw clamps to a metal bar marked off like a ruler. There were no detents or slots, so any width could be cut by simply moving the blade to the right measurement. Well, a young woman comes along wearing one of the store vests and I tell her I need blinds cut and show her my measurements. She looks at them and looks me straight in the eyes and tells me, “The machine doesn’t do fractions.”
I almost fell over.
http://www.crinfo.org/articlesummary/10594/
Bushman society is fairly egalitarian, with power being evenly and widely dispersed. This makes coercive bilateral power-plays (such as war) less likely to be effective, and so less appealing. A common unilateral power play is to simply walk away from a dispute which resists resolution. Travel among groups and extended visits to distant relatives are common. As Ury explains, Bushmen have a good unilateral BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement). It is difficult to wage war on someone who can simply walk away. Trilateral power plays draw on the power of the community to force a settlement. The emphasis on consensual conflict resolution and egalitarian ethos means that Bushmen communities will not force a solution on disputing parties. However the community will employ social pressure, by for instance ostracizing an offender, to encourage dispute resolution.
Please explain to me how Bushmen picked up the above from industrialized society. It strikes me as highly unlikely that this pattern of behavior didn’t predate the industrial era.
Did you consider precisely what you were objecting to, or was this a knee-jerk reaction to a general category?
Computation market prices can and do go down. But since society can grow almost infinitely quickly (by copying ems), from an em’s POV it’s more relevant to say that everything else’s price goes up.
A society of super-optimizers better have a darn good reason for allowing resource use to outstrip N^3. (And no doubt, they often will.)
A society of super-optimizers that regulates itself in a way resulting in mass death either isn’t so much super-optimized, or has a rather (to me) unsavory set of values.
Otherwise we might as well talk about a society of <10 planet-sized Jupiter brains, each owning its physical computing substrate and so immortal short of violent death.
Past a certain point of optimization power, all deaths become either violent or voluntary.
Instead of the deletion or killing of uploads that want to live but can’t cut it economically, why not slow them down? (Perhaps to the point where they are only as “quick” and “clever” as an average human being is today.) Given that the cost of computation keeps decreasing, this should impose a minimal burden on society going forward. This could also be an inducement to find better employment, especially if employers can temporarily grant increased computation resources for the purposes of the job.
From what I have read of groups in the Amazon and New Guinea, if you were to walk away from your group and try to walk into another, you would most likely be killed, and possibly captured and enslaved.
Perhaps this varies because of local environmental/economic conditions. From my undergraduate studies, I seem to remember that !Kung Bushmen would sometimes walk away from conflicts into another group.
In my experience, Pandora simply doesn’t tend to give me music that I like even when I put in an artist that I like.
Yes, Pandora does give me music with qualities in common with the music I like. It’s just that those aren’t the qualities that make me really like the music. Instead, I just get ho-hum dopplegangers of bands that I like.
Perhaps we should view our moral intuitions as yet another evolved mechanism, in that they are imperfect and arbitrary though they work well enough for hunter gatherers.
When we lived as hunter gatherers, an individual could find a group with compatible moral intuitions or walk away from a group with incompatible ones. The ability or possibility that an unpleasant individual’s moral intuitions would affect you from one valley over was minimal.
One should note, though, that studies of murder rates amongst hunter gatherer groups found that they were on the high side compared to industrialized societies.
No, but it will tell you if you aren’t getting enough in general, which is more relevant since sleep debt can build up over several days.
Yes, locked in. When I was using the Zeo, all of your data lived on their flash based site, and there was no obvious way to get it out and into your own analytic tools.
Also, for purposes of managing sleep hygiene, you don’t need highly accurate records. Moderately accurate data will benefit most individuals with imperfect sleep hygiene.
I had a Zeo for awhile. It does a pretty good job, but it was disturbing how locked-in your data was. There are smartphone apps that will also gather comparable data for much less:
http://lifehacker.com/5441045/sleep-cycle-analyzes-your-sleep-patterns-for-a-better-wake+up
Also, if you snore, then blood oxygenation level is not a bad proxy for sleep, and clinical quality devices are available on ebay for much less than a new Zeo.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult
A few things to look for, gleaned from the Wikipedia article:
In Cults, coercive Mind Control is said to take these forms:
- People are put in physically or emotionally distressing situations; - Their problems are reduced to one simple explanation, which is repeatedly emphasized; - They receive what seems to be unconditional love, acceptance, and attention from a charismatic leader or group; - They get a new identity based on the group; - They are subject to entrapment (isolation from friends, relatives and the mainstream culture)Cults also seem to involve the adulation of charismatic leaders, who become corrupted by the power the situation brings them. The most common complaints against cults involve sexual abuse of members. Cults have also been known to cause harm through getting members to forego medical care.
I think this is ok for a place to start.
I’ve occasionally met people who are surprised and even incredulous to learn that the tinwhistle, recorder, and piccolo are different instruments, though no one who has ever spent time getting good with any of those instruments would think of them as hard to distinguish, even through double blind listening tests. It’s all a matter of what you pay attention to.
LessWrong is already my substitute for TVTropes.
I came here expecting suggestions for ways to spend less time on sites like LessWrong.org.
Right, but general optimization power is also really vague.
This sounds unattractive at the outset, but could one relate optimization power in economic terms? A machine super-optimizer would most likely have to become an economic power on its way to subverting the world’s industrial infrastructure. If one can relate optimization power to economic power, then one could make a strong argument for the inability of human civilization to control a machine super-optimizer.
I had in mind Chalmer’s definition: “Let us say that AI++ (or superintelligence) is AI of far greater than human level (say, at least as far beyond the most intelligent human as the most intelligent human is beyond a mouse)”
Is this in fact a definition? Is there a meaningful way we can comparatively measure the intelligence of both a human and a mouse? I don’t know of any way we can compare that doesn’t assume that humans are smarter. (Cortical folding, brain vs. body mass.)
In fact, is there a definition of the kind of superintelligence discussed here at length at all? We can do this through information-theory, and define intelligence with regards to optimization power, but how does one relate such definitions to the supposed capabilities of super-intelligences discussed here?
Simply switch to using it as a punishment on the days that you have little appetite. :)