madeofmeat
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User ID: 1063
madeofmeat
24d ago
@gemmaem has a less self-satisfied review up, Ross Douthat's Sandbox Universe
Douthat wants to go beyond the fine tuning argument, however, arguing not just that there is a God, but that humans are special to God in a way that is not shared by anything else that we are aware of. Consciousness is special, he argues, because the “Copenhagen Theory [sic]” of quantum mechanics is “scientific evidence that mind somehow precedes matter.” Regrettably, Douthat’s argument here is based not on the work of any physicist, but rather on an essay in the Claremont Review of Books by Spencer Klavan, who holds a doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Yale.
Approvingly quoted by Douthat, Klavan goes so far as to claim that photons, atoms and the like “cannot exist unseen,” and hence that all of our scientific theories about things that happened before humanity are “about how things would have behaved if there was someone there to watch them.” This is then used to set up an argument for God: “The most fearsome heresy of all … is that indeed there was someone there.”
Let’s think this through. If we suppose that observation by a conscious mind is enough by itself to collapse a quantum wavefunction from probability into actuality, and if God is essentially a conscious Mind, like our minds except perfect and all-knowing and much more powerful, then every wave function must already be collapsed, since God sees all. Yet we know from physical experiments that this is not the case, because this would make the entire field of quantum mechanics unnecessary! The postulates of Klavan, which Douthat encourages us to accept, thus bring us to a startling conclusion. We would appear to have scientific proof that God cannot possibly exist.
madeofmeat
1mo ago
Roger Penrose has been beating this drum since the 1990s and hasn't managed to convince many other people, but he is a Nobel laureate now so I guess he's a pretty high-profile advocate. The way he argues for this stuff feels more like a cope for preserving some sort of transcendental, irreducible aura for human mathematical thinking rather than empirically solid neuroscience though.
madeofmeat
2mo ago
Check out a website called Anna's Archive. You have to get pretty obscure before they don't have a free full download of a book.
madeofmeat
6mo ago
Ever tried reading old philosophy? Plenty of relatable cantankerous depressives like Schopenhauer overthinking stuff out there, but possibly ending up with some genuinely interesting viewpoints instead of just stuff you could fill in yourself starting from "guy's depressed".
madeofmeat
6mo ago
I feel like there's something tricky here. There used to be the thing where people were going "schools should teach critical thinking", that certainly sounds like a cross-domain understanding of sorts. People actually tried to do this, and it turned out that it's either very hard or impossible with the existing toolkit of teaching domain-specific stuff. Maybe it can't really be taught and some people just pick it up by themselves, maybe it needs one-on-one tutoring that doesn't scale.
It's also tricky to apply a fuzzy "might be relevant to business success" / "probably isn't" judgment to rigid curricula and socially recognized pursuits. People will want to legibilize things into clear-lined singular pursuits like "playing tennis" or "being an accountant".
madeofmeat
6mo ago
The success stories for very early hyperspecialization seem to be very "inside the box" things like playing the violin or being good at golf or chess. You know exactly what you're supposed to do, what is and isn't allowed is tightly circumscribed, and mastery generally just involves knowing as much stuff inside the allowed box and being very well trained at executing it. Things like business or science aren't like this. You are allowed to come up with completely new things for both what you're trying to accomplish and for how you're going to do it. Arguably there's still a box of physical reality and the laws of nature, but those aren't exactly easy to start getting a hang of at age five, unlike "what are the rules of chess" or "how do you hold a violin". If you want to do the sort of cross-cutting paradigm-busting that pushes things ahead, having been hyper-specialized into one of what your parents' generation thought was the set of relevant schemas for succeeding in the world might not be that helpful.
madeofmeat
8mo ago
The mods include the site administrator, so it's kind of a given they can even if it weren't stated explicitly. Sharecropping sites like Reddit where the mods are just slightly more privileged users and the people running the site aren't cooperative are a special case, not how most internet sites works.
madeofmeat
9mo ago
Maybe don't try to force yourself to be "widely cultured", but lean in on specific interests hyperfocus instead. Try to find a thing or three that are not stereotypically low status nerd culture, but also obscure enough that you're not likely to run into anyone else being into this specific thing. Like medieval Chinese painting, Roman poetry or political theology in the Byzantine Empire. Poke around anything older than 50-100 years and then when something looks interesting, just dive all in on the rabbithole of that specific thing. The plan is to come off as more of a foreigner of the same social class, you're not quite versed in the same stuff everyone else is but still giving the roughly correct vibe, rather than an easily pigeonholeable weeb pleb. If you can find some specific thing with good cultural valences you can get yourself to be genuinely interested in, that's going to be a huge force multiplier with actually getting deep enough in the thing for it to do some good.
madeofmeat
9mo ago
(I think Zorba should fix the system so that AAQCs don't get flagged the same as "Reported").
The potential Quality Contributions are the best part of janitor duty.
madeofmeat
10mo ago
It's good for some things that can be solved with ten lines of code and that only depend on commonly understood concepts like files, databases and dates and not, for example, the architectural details of a private codebase. How complex of a game are you thinking and how do you see yourself describing what you want in the game to the AI? Games have lots of trickiness going on with them, they grow up to have idiosyncratic codebases where you need to understand the local architecture, bigger ones are logically very complex and all parts need to keep making sense given the overarching design, they're by definition somewhat unique and you often need to do many rounds of iteration to get the code to correspond to the behavior you want them to have.
madeofmeat
10mo ago
The link to the "I don't see any value in the HBD hypothesis." comment is broken by the ?context parameter (because of deleted comments upstream?). This seems to be a working link.
In general, I wish TheMotte's comment linking would work more like reddit's or Hacker News' instead of trying to force the context-parameters and #context everywhere (what's this even for?). Support a permalink that's a post-url/12345 (add a 'permalink' link under the comment that gets you this) that shows only the 12345 post and it's children and an anchor link post-url#12345 (you could make the timestamp of the post clickable and give you this) that shows the whole thread but centers on the given post. Don't add extra "show context" parameters unless the user asks for it.
The first Steel Battalion was a cult hit. The actual disaster was the sequel from 2012 that tried to do the same thing with Kinect motion controls instead of a custom controller.
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