Karpal
1mo ago
OK, as I explained to the other commenter, I think you're wrong, but I understand why you think they're the same. On first reading it seemed like you must have missed a sentence.
Karpal
1mo ago
They're really not the same.
We have zero sum and non-zero sum relationships with everyone. Simplifying from a nation to a single company as an example:
Everyone from the owner down to janitor have a shared stake in the company staying solvent, but there are non zero sum relationships too. The owner would like to pay the janitor the smallest amount that still gets his floors cleaned and toilets unblocked. Part of the janitor's bargaining power is that while he won't work for a peanut, no one else will either. If the owner can pull some strings and get access to a bunch of workers who will work for a peanut then the janitor had better either accept the peanut or be out off a job. They are aligned in some ways, but not in others. This is true no matter how much value the new cheap workers add to the company or how much of the savings could potentially be passed on to the consumer.
If we dismiss the janitor's complaints as a dumb yokel failing to understand that immigrants are adding to the economy and increasing his buying power, we're the ones not understanding the whole picture.
Karpal
1mo ago
"Even conservatives (who are more sided towards birth rates being an issue but still 40% believe in overpopulation more) do it when they complain about immigrants "taking jobs""
This seems very obviously false. Do you actually believe this? That conservatives who complain about immigrants taking jobs are concerned about sharing a fixed pie with more people rather than with immigrants who will do jobs for less money forcing the price of labour down. I'm far from a conservative, but I've heard the second plenty (from people on both sides) and never, even once, heard the first.
Karpal
3mo ago
It's not preserving 'the original biological machinery in the original way' that is important, it may be about preserving a process that entails subjective experience.
It feels intuitive to me that the processes of certain kinds of systems feel like something from the perspective of the system and some don't. A purely indexical system (like a thermostat or an optimised 'follow the instructions of the earing' system) seems like the second type. Systems that intuitively don't seem like they'd have subjective experience.
I can't think of any way to test this, but it feels right that for a system to have subjective experience, or would have to:
- Have more than a single goal or proximal goal
- Process external and internal data differently
- Is self-changed by the process
These are true for a person making decisions in life. They aren't true for an optimised 'follow the instructions of the earing' system no matter how accurately the instructions achieve the person's own original goals. I like that greg Egan short too, but I don't think the earing and the 'jewel' are the same because the jewel learns to copy the process of the person's thought, the earing (probably) doesn't.
Just a feeling.
Karpal
3mo ago
This is a completely rational and a smart way to think and a completely rational and smart thing to say anywhere in the world except in a forum where we agree to deal with each other's arguments as stated and not the nefarious motives we imagine behind the arguments.
Karpal
4mo ago
Red, green and blue mars are pretty lefty and very good. Maybe not modern left enough, but having (at least three) main characters rant uninterrupted about the evils of capitalism for several pages should count.
Karpal
6mo ago
My two cents is that this forum isn't really the place for disparaging misspellings of opponents' arguments (da joos, freeze peach, da menz etc), but I've reported it a few times and nothing has come of it, so I guess the mod-team disagree. That's fair.
Karpal
7mo ago
It would only be a temporary solution, one that works for a world with ai that is as good or slightly better than we have now, it doesn't work in a world where ai does everything better and cheaper than humans because our three days of effort is a valueless as our five days. No one really knows when we'll end up there, but I haven't heard a convincing argument for it being impossible and it might be years rather than lifetimes away.
I also don't think Ubi can be anything other than a temporary solution. Money has no value of its own, it represents created value. In a world in which humans don't create any value, why would the robots or robot-owning class want to exchange the real things they made for 'money' that's given out freely to everyone? What can they do with it? They can't buy anything that the humans produce because humans don't produce anything. They can only exchange it for things of robot-created value, which they already have.
Karpal
7mo ago
She didn't, or at least she only killed the witchking in the same sense that aragorn threw down the black gate or Frodo threw the ring into orodruin.
Karpal
10mo ago
That's pretty accurate. I thought the culture war angle was about the streaming 'chats'. Raja had already accepted the wrestler's apology for his mistake (he thought raja was part of the show) but may have been goaded into his murderous rage by the people following his stream (he was still streaming/reading 'chats' while the show went on) who had no interest in the wellbeing of anyone involved and just wanted to see drama /get a reaction. I don't think race was a major factor at all.
It predates the internet, I remember 'Billy Nomates' and I think I remember a 'John Everyman'. John Smith was the guy who wasn't who he said he was. I'm sure there are others.
I like it, it's an efficient and sometimes witty way to make it clear that we're talking about an example with a particular characteristic not a real person. And for the rest of the conversation you can just call them by their first name: 'Billy' instead of 'our hypothetical unpopular socially awkward example'.
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