burrows

This ability that you are describing, do you have a recommendation for how we (as scientists) can measure it in people?

Are the risks associated with invasiveness fixed (eg, there will always be at least a 1/15000 chance that a patient dies within the first year of receiving a neural implant), or can they be reduced with better technology and more understanding of the brain?

Are you sure it’s the same story?

Or are we seeing reports of incremental improvements to technologies for communicating with locked-in people.

> It clearly means that, _other than paying taxes like everyone else in the free world_ I do not have to pay for it.

So, other than paying for it, I don’t have to pay for it?

Again, I find this sort of comment confusing.

> This is at the same level as finding a free penny on the street and going "No, but hang on, _someone_ paid to mint this penny so I am extremely confused as to why you would say this penny is free?!"

I think it’s closer to calling the food in the refrigerator at my house “free”. Or calling repairs at the auto shop “free” when the insurance company (who I pay) pays the shop.

But I think OP does pay for it, as she suggests here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30788837

First OP says, “X is free for me.”, then she says, “My taxes pay for X.” It looks to me that says she both does and does not pay for it, that’s why I’m confused.

> You wanted a baby, you are there when your partner gives birth, you are both happy. What difference does it make where the DNA came from?

Thinking about raising a baby from some other father activates my disgust reaction. But maybe it’s more related to the idea of the woman’s (hidden?) infidelity than the baby itself.

> There are plenty of folks who have to rely on sperm donors or surrogate mothers to make a baby happen.

I don’t see other people’s difficulties as relevant to my preferences.

For example, homeless people eating from trash cans doesn’t affect my dietary choices.

> What else could it even be?

As I said, my usage is closer to calling a thing “free” if I consume it without paying for it, and importantly it doesn’t matter who receives the bill.

If my wife buys a new couch for our home with a credit card that is nominally her’s, but for which I make the payments, I would not call the couch free despite the credit card bill being in her name.

> You started your gotcha with the truism that it's not free, so, yeah, nothing is free, and the whole discussion is meaningless. You're arguing in bad faith, but that just makes your argument meaningless.

I just asked a question about the meaning of “free” in this context.

> Your counterargument is that there exist diseases that cannot be treated anywhere?

My counterexample to the claim, “There are current Earth societies where no one is unable to get treatment because of insufficient funds”, is anyone in these candidate societies with a currently untreatable disease.

I don’t understand your point about typhus.

I generally don’t refer to a repair subsidized by my car insurance as free. Do you?

I do not want to invest significant resources into progeny that is not my own. Doing a paternity test reduces the possibility of this.

> And in fact for a proportion of the population it is in fact free or nearly so because they have never paid any income tax or the cost was so high that the taxes they did pay plus the proceeds of selling very possession they had and selling their children into servitude still wasn't enough to pay for it.

Okay, so if the person receiving the service doesn’t pay taxes, then they do not pay for the service. And for everyone else that does pay taxes, it is a cost with no attendant service.

> we all understand the point of taxation and redistribution (at least in Europe we do)

What is the point?

> what exactly was the point you were repeatedly failing to make clear?

I don’t have some huge point. I’m just confused by this usage of “free”. There are other usages that I find confusing as well.

A child tells his friends that everything on Amazon is free, meanwhile his parents silently pay for his purchases.

Someone steals a car and tells her friends that she has a new free car.

> It's pretty clear what 'free' means here, the person getting the treatment is not billed for the treatment.

Actually I think that’s a pretty good example of what confuses me about this usage of “free”. Usually when I call something “free” I am making a claim about who pays for the thing, but as you pointed out, in this case it has something to do with who is billed by the service provider.

> In that way, a society organizes that no one has the existential threat (financially or medically) of prohibitively high cost.

IMO, no current Earth society comes close to that criteria. For example, if someone has a currently untreatable disease, then isn’t that just saying the cost of treatment is prohibitively high? ie, the cost of hiring scientists, renting lab space, running trials, etc.

Okay, you give the government money (taxes) and then the government pays the clinics for your medical care (with the tax money).

But doesn’t that mean you’re still paying for your own medical care with the government acting as a middle-man? So then it’s not free.

IMO you make a wise point:

Doing a paternity test may necessarily or inadvertently reveal to his wife a limit of his trust for her.

What does the word “free” mean here?

I assume the clinical professionals are paid and the researchers were paid and the pharma venders are paid, so that money is coming from somewhere. Is it that someone other than you pays for it?

What are the compelling reasons not to get a DNA test as a man (when a woman is claiming, “You are the biological father of this baby.”)?

Is it expensive or illegal or will your friends shame you or the woman will be angry?

> Are you arguing that there is no a priori reason to prefer democracy?

I suggest these definitions, but am open to revisions.

def: a government is the smallest set of people with a (almost) monopoly of force in a particular geographic region.

def: democracy is a government where the set size is at least 10% of the total number of people occupying the geographic region.

def: autocracy is government where the set size is one.

Presently, it is not clear to me how to make a persuasive and coherent a priori argument in favor of democracy. I believe you have a nomination for such an argument, please share.

X is vastly overrated.

It looks to me that you are expressing a preference for democracy relative to autocracy. I assume this preference is based on a historical evaluation of the performance of democratic and autocratic governments? For example, Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union were autocratic regimes that killed millions of non-combatants in the 20th century, while America and the UK, both democratic regimes, did nothing of the kind in the 20th century?

But then if you saw enough autocratic regimes not doing these things, (Singapore?), could you be brought around to preferring autocracy?

OP might be referring to value neutral labels like “thinking”, “feeling”, “vibration”, “buzzing”, etc.

Could you please clarify your point? I don’t understand the comment as is.

Are there truths that are neither tautological (mathematical) nor empirical? I would suggest those statements are only meaningful if in principle we could measure the weight of a faerie.

As another example, I suggest that “Every idea weighs more than 10kg” and “Every idea weighs 10kg or less” are both not meaningful, because it is not possible to measure the weight of a given idea.

And so consider a claim like, “Consciousness has property X”, how can I decide whether or not such a claim is true?

edit: That last claim should have been, “Some other person’s consciousness has property X”.

So then is one of these propositions true?

Every North American faerie weighs more than 10kg.

Every North American faerie weighs 10kg or less.

> The point is that just because you can't prove something to yourself it doesn't make the belief incoherent.

If a proposition doesn’t make predictions about my empirical experience then what is it saying?

And if a proposition does make such empirical predictions, than it’s effectively just a name for those predictions.

That’s essentially the view I’m coming from.

> At any rate, there's plenty of things we believe about say quantum mechanics without being able to observe them directly by using theory and observing secondary effects.

I don’t know any physics so I can’t comment.

Why are propositions about consciousness different from propositions about faeries?

> You can't but that doesn't change the mechanism of arriving at beliefs.

I’m trying to question the coherence of the proposition itself, and not trying to refute an argument in favor of it.

> You yourself can also never physically check say Plato's skull either but I doubt that deters you from thinking he had a brain.

The Plato’s brain question (PB) confuses me, but here is my attempt at an analysis.

First, I think PB is tricky in the same way that all historical propositions are tricky. And I think this trickiness is different than the trickiness around the proposition “other people are conscious”.

Second, here is a scenario that I think is like PB. Consider the proposition, “The Great Wall of China exists.” I’ve never been to China, but say you go and tell me that you saw the wall. And in principle I could go see the wall for myself. But now what if the wall is destroyed before I go to see it? Was the proposition that, “The Great Wall of China exists”, coherent before the wall’s demise, but now incoherent?

But if you tell me, “I am having subjective experiences”, how can/could I ever in principle examine this for myself, as I could the Great Wall?

Right, I have a low probability belief that a random human won’t have a brain in their head.

But in principle, I could open someone’s skull and look for a brain. How would I examine another human body for consciousness?

Do you believe it makes sense to even claim that other humans are conscious?

If conscious is defined as “to have subjective experiences”, then I don’t believe “other people are conscious” is coherent.

The argument I hear usually is that other bodies are constructed like my body and I’m conscious therefore they are probably conscious too.

But I think this completely misses the point. The issue is the proposition itself. How can that proposition be translated into empirical claims? If the answer is just that other bodies are like my body, then conscious is just a fancy synonym of “is a human being”.

We can do a risk profile for an email with a custom domain versus a gmail domain.

Do we need to differentiate between custom email domain with self-hosted mail server and custom email domain with gmail?

If I self-host the mail server then I’ll have a machine running on digital ocean or ec2 and this machine will accept connections from the Internet. I think this machine should be included in the assessment. So now the risk of a custom email domain depends on when/how I apply patches and how ssh access is configured?

Seems like the author is making a reasonable point to me. The risk profile for a gmail email address and a custom domain email address are different and developers may benefit from understanding this difference.

I don’t think he’s attacking the character or intelligence of people who use custom domains, he’s pointing out a gotcha that they may not be aware of.

Right. But I didn’t assert that all things can be gainfully modeled.

I suggested that the non-specific incompleteness of a model isn’t a compelling reason not to use the model.

> education has inherently unquantifiable value that cannot be expressed in a spreadsheet. Ever.

Any attempt at modeling any phenomena will fail to capture some aspect of that phenomena. So are you suggesting that all attempts at modeling are inherently flawed and must lead to ridiculous conclusions?