FeepingCreature
No bio...
User ID: 311
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
those who thought like you are long dead
This does not match my experience. At the least, like you yourself said, the vision is fundamentally Christian - so it's hard to argue that universal resurrection and ascension into eternal paradise has no ideological staying power.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
digg and tumblr died because, as in the meme, they shoved a stick in their own spokes. There needs to be alternative stuff available, but there is also often a sudden shock: with digg the atrocious frontpage redesign, with tumblr the porn ban. (With LessWrong the end of Eliezer's posts...)
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I think they see the immediate round of the game and their actions as influencing only or primarily the outcomes of that round, yes.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
our only actual hope for salvation: our children.
I for one am expecting a technological singularity in a few years.
Is he upset that Karlin is choosing Russian nationalism over Cosmism in general? Or is it only because the cause itself is lost and counter-productive to Russian nationalism?
I think it's a sentiment of "damn it, you had it! you had the right view!"
"Would you be OK with 100% of Europe being replaced by Africans, if all of the Africans were Christians?"
Are Christians Christianity-maximizers? I'm genuinely not sure the religion leads to that conclusion.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
The part of my brain that handles finances is not on speaking terms with the one that handles forecasts.
Besides, I should always bet against the singularity. No way to lose, really.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I have to say I agree that the parent comment was "asking for it" in this case. It doesn't read as genuine misunderstanding but as cutesy gotcha masqueraded by thinly feigned incomprehension.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Okay but garbage collection is better than reference counting for performance though, and reference counting is better than manual for sanity, certainly so when you're writing trees.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
my only runtime error messages were just segmentation fault.
gdb --args !!
You can even set the SIGSEGV handler to automatically attach gdb to the running program.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I also have the experience that I am incapable of remembering things that are not applicable.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
What got me started on programming was fractals. To this day, I greet every new language I learn with a Mandelbrot renderer. But I believe there needs to be a hook. For me, it was pretty pictures. That got me into graphics, OpenGL, raytracing, and I learnt programming almost as a side effect. For other people it will be other things. But there needs to be a thing that you want to make the computer do. That empowering cycle, of "I speak the magic incantation and then the machine does my bidding," is what drives motivation, and motivation is the primary factor of learning programming.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Yeah, pretty much. Germans want the US occupation out. It's pretty widespread
To be clear, this is "a slight majority of Germans approve of US forces leaving". "Germans want the US occupation out" makes it sound like people have strong feelings about this, which is not, I believe, in evidence. Broadly, it's simply not a concern on a level that sways elections.
Re that interview, I might be misunderstanding Haig but I don't really read it as military coercion so much as quid pro quo. And as the interview continues, this is made clearer.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Sure, but just bt and q already gets you 50% of the benefit.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
It's just an overload of the term "expect". It's not that we "expect", in the sense of having a social demand, that good programmers will be obsessive and do their profession as a hobby, it's that we "expect", in the sense of anticipated experience, that programmers won't be good unless it also happens to be the case that they're obsessive and do their profession as a hobby.
Of course, that instantly turns it into a signalling mechanism and Goodhart's it to death. But in spaces where there's less pressure on quality, the pattern is still observable.
I feel like, when you're talking about quadrillions of beings, our existing reasoning breaks down. That is assuming race is still going to be relevant post-singularity, which is at least highly questionable. I think skin color is going to go the way of rare dyes, where rarity used to signal social standing, but now that anyone can trivially have any dye in near any number, it's relegated entirely to aesthetic preference. - What else is there? IQ? Personal choice. Conscientiousness? Personal choice. Neuroticism? Habits? All, all, editable.
In the future, there will be a million times more white-people descendants, a million times more black-people descendants. There will be cross-blending, customization, randomization, de novo species. There will be telepaths, hiveminds, superintelligences, copyclans, and weirder things that we cannot even imagine now. I don't have an answer for you - but I'll eat my hat if the predominant moral question as we approach the physical Malthusian limit will be one of race.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Eh, agree-disagree. It could be that many things have objective answers that are just very hard to figure out. I think a lot of people arguing here act under the premise that they can convince people, which only works if they're right and others are wrong.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Have you read Scott's Who By Very Slow Decay? When your remaining lifespan is expected negative value, suicide is sane.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
Thought experiment: you are a Ukrainian prisoner of war in Russia. God appears before you and informs you, objectively, that you will live to age 80 and you will consider your life worth living for almost every one of those remaining years. However, the Russians are going to horribly torture you for a week and in that time, you're gonna beg for death every day.
You have a good shot at killing yourself. Do you have a duty to future-you to not do it? Do your fellow prisoners have a duty to stop you? Personally, I think no. No future reward suffices to create a duty to endure present unbearable suffering.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
I should hope that the median human life does not involve begging for death! Intensity and locality of suffering has its own quality.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
If you don't have to live for your future self, to whom you owe the most out of anyone, why would you have to live for future children?
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
The notion that some kid with PTSD is in the same boat as a decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee is beyond absurd.
There are people who assert that suicide is always wrong. I think this argument is "haggling over the price."
Then I'll just argue that suicide should not be forbidden. You can't stop me, mwahaha.
I'm not saying a line cannot be drawn, I'm saying there's two different arguments here. And for that matter, this argument still implies the line - presumably you would not say something like "people wil use any exception to argue for allowing decrepit Alzheimers patients to kill themselves." So your line is still there; you cannot construct a principled argument by saying "otherwise, the unprincipled line would be violated."
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
No I don't, there's nothing wrong with price-haggling. You'll just use different arguments for it.
I think the kid with PTSD and the decaying immobile nonagenarian amputee are comparable. You think they're qualitatively different. Fine, make your case, or at least describe it with more detail than "beyond absurd". At least specify some sort of metric.You can't just construct reference classes by appeal to absurdity.
I think most of us would object to even a purely voluntary decision to kill oneself under those circumstances
I'm not sure if I do. Though of course, if this is the only option on offer, we-as-society should figure out a way to do better.
FeepingCreature
1yr ago
"Haggling over the price" implies that the principle is invalid.
It implies that the principle is not in play. I think both lines and principles are valid, but cannot be argued with the same rhetoric tools.
I think there's simply widespread disagreement about the validity and brand of used game theory. Some people really do conceptualize their behavior with causal decision theories and some with timeless/functional kinds.
More options
Context Copy link