3,473 karma · joined May 6, 2011
An hypothesis that cannot be falsified does not count as a scientific theory (according to Popper, not everyone agrees). That does not mean that is woo. It just means that it's outside the epistemological limits of science.
Another thing that is unmeasurable is science, and yet most people don't doubt it.
> The singularity and AGI are apocalypse for atheists.
I agree with that to a degree.
You're joking about the "quality content" part, right?
Nothing except antitrust laws...
Was it a common occurrence in the US, that construction workers would cause accidents because of smoking cannabis? And btw, do you know of any study showing a negative correlation between drug testing and accidents? Or is this more "lie detector"-style "science" -- an excuse to stick your nose in other people's private affairs?
> Do you have any reason to believe this is an actual, honest to God, widespread problem?
Yes, my professional experience. American workers seem to find intrusive practices such as drug testing perfectly normal, exactly in the way that you are expressing. In Europe, such tests are much more regulated, as well as many other forms of abuse of power by the employer, and yet I never had any problems with bricks falling over my head.
No security implications there. Of course, by security, it is meant "security against lawsuits". Actual human beings don't really matter in this equation.
Maybe we don't live in the same world???
> The mobile and web revolution brought easy to use software into the hands of billions.
Yes, but this software is not empowering the users, it is controlling them, isolating them, radicalizing them and making them feel more depressed.
I mean that, maybe you should distrust your own judgement that "HN is the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet". Perhaps other places have environments that you don't like but other people feel that they are "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet".
> I'm part of a ton of other forums and communities, and over time almost all of them have devolved into complete and utter dogshit, just an endless stream of memes and screenshots of Twitter posts.
In my experience this has a lot more to do with algorithmic instead of chronological ordering. Facebook for example, where a lot of communities have gone to die, is a context-destroying engine. Only memes and shitposts can survive. What is the point of writing something thoughtful if you don't know if anyone will even see it?
Otherwise, online communities have a lifetime. Before HN there was Slashdot and Kuro5hin. They were nice at some point, then devolved into shit. Same thing will happen to HN and everything else, of course.
> The communities that remain successful either have total strict moderation or a "shitposts" section where all of the garbage ends up, but even then the quarantine zone ends up sucking up a lot of the forum energy. I think it's best to just not have it at all.
My favorite community uses a completely different strategy: there are no moderators but it is relatively obscure. Shit posters come and go, nobody reacts, all is fine. It has been going on for more than two decades. I will not disclose it because I do not want to ruin it, but I bet lots of things like this exist. They don't make money nor are they advertising arms of money-making operations, so nobody really cares. No newspaper will ever write an editorial about them -- this is why they are so great!
Don't you find it a bit suspicious that the forum you happen to like is "the only reasonable discussion forum remaining on the internet"?
In what sense are they different? Consider that the molecules that make up a person's body are completely replaced over the course of n years. One decade ago you were a different chunk of matter, but the same person.
> Your copy is only like you, but not you.
Ok, let's assume you are right. The copy will still be 100% convinced that it is me. How do I know this is not happening to me already, that I am not a "fake" already?
> It doesn't matter if you're emulated, because the same would happen to the emulation, a fork of a emulation won't mean that the emulation would wake up in the body of the fork.
Organisms wake up and feel whatever they feel. An organism with an exact copy of my memories and processes will be 100% convinced that it is "me". This could already be happening to me, how could I tell? I am just repeating trivial arguments from an ongoing philosophical discussion that has been going on for millennia.
You propose to solve this discussion with authoritative proclamations, but I would rather read your arguments.
>> Why? What makes you you?
> My history until now.
?
> that fork starts to diverge within that new environment as it adapts to it, and won't recognizable for long, so it's not even a good idea for conservation.
>> Maybe you are already being emulated, how would you know?
> It doesn't matter.
?
You seem to be arguing against yourself.
Why? What makes you you? Maybe you are already being emulated, how would you know?
> And that fork starts to diverge within that new environment as it adapts to it, and won't recognizable for long
That can also be said of the passage of time. Every moment there are forks in the road, and whatever you are is constantly diverging from what you were -- otherwise nothing would be happening to you.
The ad business model guarantees that our interests are misaligned. I don't want to depend on intelligent agents that want to sell me things, and I don't think anyone with half a brain would either. The more intelligent they are, the more one should fear being manipulated and spied upon if one those not control them.
Sure you can, as long as you control the system. There is nothing preventing us from realizing the old dream of having AIs dedicated to working for us, the users, not some corporation.
It just so happens that the the current favorite business model of big tech is serving us ads, but does this business model serve us? I don't think so.
> Users expect their programs to give them up-to-the-minute information from the internet, with slick animation and nuanced typography.
Do these requirements really come from the users? Or do they, in fact, come mainly from tech people? I never understood this mentality that mobile devices must be considered at all costs for all cases, and it seems to me that this mentality comes and always came from industry people, not users. I suspect this is related to three things:
- The laptop/PC market is "saturated", in the sense that it can no longer hyper-grow, so it's not so convenient to make a billion or two;
- A new zoo of careers paths has grown out of mobile and the startup era: UX designer, Product-Whatever, Growth-"Hacker", Agile Wizard, Evangelist Something etc, etc. It's very hard to convince someone of something when they salary depends on them not believing it, says the cliché but is true;
- It is more lucrative to show ads to passive consumers than to sell software to creators.*
This is a situation where the current game of Silicon Valley capitalism (copied everywhere) configures a race to the bottom in terms of the expression of human potential.
* This is why, even when you want to buy a tool, you now have to "subscribe to a service", with the loss of sense of ownership and control that comes with it.
Nothing that I said is related to the supply and demand of anything.
> When you said all information is filtered by the government, that shows your ignorance of how things work in China.
All information is potentially filtered / monitored by the government. I am well aware that people use VPNs to circumvent censorship, and that censorship itself is highly flawed. That does not change the fact that, once inside such a repressive apparatus, you cannot be certain of anything you read and you cannot feel safe in reading it. This is a country where people "disappear" for wrongthinking.
> The rest are not worth responding to.
This is the typical answer of those who have no counter-arguments.
So what? That does not make censorship morally acceptable. This would be the same as saying that using slave labor is ok, if you do it in a country that already accepts slavery anyway, and you are treating you slaves better.
> And by surfacing better information for queries, it can also help people finding what they want for things that are not censored.
Once the state is performing censorship there is no such thing as "better information". If all information is filtered by the government, then all information is suspicious.
> but do consider how lives of hundreds of millions of people will be affected by your actions/inactions.
I have profound sympathy for the victims of authoritarian regimes, and I absolutely do not believe that the way to help them is to collaborate with the very system that oppresses them. Pretending otherwise sounds like Newspeak to me.
> I know some people prefer to stick their noses up and hold what they perceive as the moral high ground
Maybe some people are like that, but this is unimportant. The important thing is this: you have to put your own oxygen mask on before helping others. If we in the west allow our companies to collaborate with systems that hold values that are repugnant to our own, then we will become like those systems, not the other way around. There will be nowhere to hide. No thank you.
Let's not be naive: say what you want about the Chinese government, but they are not imbeciles. If they did not perceive Dragonfly as something that would help them maintain their repressive apparatus, they would not allow it.
I find that the great challenge that confronts our species is precisely the search for meaning.
There are myriad options for sale in the marketplace of ideas, many coming with pre-packaged meaning. This is the typical case with Judeo-Christian religions, where some external authority dictates meaning to us. But let's suppose that there really is an Anthropomorphic God in the Sky that created everything and has rules for us. Ok, good for him I guess, but you have to lack a bit of imagination to not see the absurdity of that situation. It's just a parent-child relationship, with an imaginary parent, that spares the followers the pain of confronting existential questions, provided that development remains arrested.
The same is true of Atheists and Materialists. Ok, there's only atoms. Everything can be explained as a cold mechanism that progresses from the Big Bang, through evolution, to us and all of our preferences and inclinations. Of course, given that the scientific model of reality is so useful, it is easy to forget that it is just another story when it comes to meaning.
To actually reach adulthood, I believe that one has to confront the scary reality that one is one's own source of meaning. In one sense the universe is made of atoms, in another it is made of stories. Both of these models are useful, but no model can ever spare you from the task of becoming your own source of meaning.
Not even them. It only makes sense to talk about proof in formal domains such as math and logic.
Science proves nothing. It is impossible to prove that any given scientific theory will not be falsified in the future. In fact, physics was one of the main inspirations for the idea of "paradigm shift" by Thomas Kuhn in his famous work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".
Talking about proof in science is damaging, and it conveys the wrong idea about what science actually is.
Or at least while our planet is inhabitable. 44.3 degrees today in France, the highest temperature ever recorded in that country. Free markets and design decisions are great, protecting our common environment is also not such a bad idea...
It particularly astonishes me when Americans defend these costumes, given that their country was essentially created in opposition to such a class system.
Not all customs deserve respect. I guess I don't have to produce a list of all the things that were once "customs", and that now horrify us. "Sir" is a honorific that implies class distinction, to indicate that someone is socially above you, by virtue of birth or by the decision of a monarch.
I know that the British crown now give knighthoods to honor notable artists, scientists, politicians, etc. It also still uses it in the traditional sense. In the UK, you can have a seat at the House of Lords (the upper house of parliament) because of your social status, either by birth or by position in the clergy. I certainly do not respect any of that.