card_zero

See also: serpopards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpopard

YMD is Sweden or Hungary. MDY is US and pre-1960s UK. YDM is Latvia. DYM and MYD are up for grabs.

Hayek. Unless you mean somebody else. Or kayak.

I was thinking of steam locomotive enthusiasts, actually. I mean, yes, if the future of coding is similar, it would be a pretty sad, farty old hobbyist world to be consigned to. But some people understand steam engines very well, and this isn't for anything except steam engines. You get a bunch of subtle side-benefits: generic problem-solving is transferable, which in this case isn't completely generic either because the general domain is engineering and physics. There's also the history angle. It's also just interesting: who knows what the benefit is? Many assorted inspirations may crop up from the stimulation, like with pure mathematics.

But it doesn't have to be so brutally outcome-based as you're demanding, although you do get a ride on a steam train out of it too.

It's not entirely unprofitable, either, if that matters. Niche.

Good point, that's a reason to wonder.

I think this "social scurvy" thing is completely spurious, though. Some people get anxious when alone, probably including the author, hence this post justifying socializing as something everybody else needs to do. Because after all, being unsociable is socially unacceptable. But what's this based on? Being alone is correlated with ill health - well, people will tend to stay far away from you if you have the plague. One study found that people's desire for company rose hardly at all after a mere ten hours, is that surprising? I mean, make it a month, ask me again. This isn't evidence for socializing being necessary. Then we have tribal New Guineans chattering constantly about "who urinated when and where", but just because they're a model of a close-to-nature society doesn't mean the things they do are right, or healthy, and it doesn't mean we have to. (I might also wonder how close together people in tribes are in terms of genes and houses. If they count as "household", that's disqualified from being true socialization in this theory anyway.)

Well you can do the Occam's razor / Russell's teapot thing, and ask why should there be any specific thing in the absence of (unlooked-for) evidence. Perhaps it's an epidemic of silliness, you know, or itchiness, or moodiness? Could be anything or nothing.

Despite the lack of data, I have no hunch that there is any such trend anyway. Just wanted to say that before somebody inevitably says the opposite.

My gut feeling says: don't ask me, I'm a gut.

The hand-written code solves problems. Many of those are problems about how to write code. In your world, these are apparently invalidated as problems now, due to becoming less profitable: by "problem" you mean "profitable problem". Is chasing after profitable problems noble and special, I don't know, it serves demand, demand matters somewhat, fine then. But it's not the epitome of problem-solving.

If I want to start a program I can click its icon in the taskbar, if I want to see my files I can click the file manager in the taskbar, and since these actions are done with the mouse I can simultaneously lie back in bed while eating trifle with a long spoon.

Could you all stop plotting to kill me off >:(

Strong, too, she's stuck her thumb right through that plate of two-inch spaghetti pieces.

What should you not do here doesn't mean what will we stop you doing. It just means what's the wrong thing to do?

Maybe you're worrying about social pressure? I can see how general agreement that it's wrong to do XYZ can lead to forcibly preventing anybody at all from doing XYZ.

> moral vacuum, and that's not an accident

Well that's a philosophical point, because morality is bound up with opinions and personality and internal motivation, and quite possibly with creativity and with whatever intelligence really means. So it probably can't be designed into LLMs, and struggles with "alignment" probably aren't faked.

Uncertain, doubtful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49791435

(lit. "No, get the tuberculosis".)

I quite like truth, don't you? Or are you not a fan of it?

I mean I quite like jokes, metaphor, and libel, but one should probably have some restraint, details TBD.

The quoted Seventh Letter limits the argument to writing about philosophy, not writing about other things: "There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another ..."

There's also the objection to "putting it forth into a world of discord and uncomeliness". If I was being uncharitable I could say that he fears criticism, like he's saying the ideas will be ruined if taken outside of his Svengali-like reality distortion field. (Or more charitably, he wants a good faith environment to discuss them in, instead of exposing them to hostile trolls who just won't get it.)

(This is supposedly a letter written by Plato, but probably is more like fan fiction written by his contemporaries.)

They don't think anything so silly as that. He's invisible, and if you have any further questions, he's ineffable.

There's also you can't get an ought from an is, the is–ought problem. The facts don't guide your action at all, not even in an imagined neutral unbiased dispassionate way. They can only change minds as part of an argument, and the argument is going to have ideology behind it.

I disagree with what you say, so remind me later.

They might as well merge and become Chromicrapple.

That is a fictional objection raised by the Egyptian god Amun to the Egyptian god Thoth, who was supposed by the Egyptians to have invented music and writing, and was supposed by the Greeks to have invented absolutely everything else too, including botany, surveying, and government.

It's also a critique of writing, written by Plato, to impress on us that Socrates was great orator (or arguer) and was better that way. But it's not somebody's reaction to the invention of writing. It's an imagined reaction to the invention of writing.

I have also vaguely noticed that it started being called pollution sometime this century. "Huh, that's new", I thought. Not particularly surprising, though. Of course that timespan is almost 30 years, so my concept of recent change might be getting stretched.

But yeah, more familiar pollutants are dirty or caustic or radioactive, and chew holes in things or give you lung diseases or poison the wildlife, things like that, so it was a little jarring. Though I suppose we had CFCs, they didn't do anything directly harmful either.

Unpredictable things happen routinely, therefore these specific unpredictable things will happen?

I haven't seen it, but the premise is that you have a second self who is trapped at work and wants to escape. That's really not the same thing, and misses the point of my drug scenario, which is that pain and (simple) suffering outside of meaning don't have moral weight. In this TV show the inside-work-selves are leading meaningfully miserable lives, with the frustrated cognitive desire to escape. They have knowledge-forming thought processes that are being wasted.

I mean, OK, there's plenty of further tricky sci-fi dilemmas along these lines. But I was interested in pain in the context of animal rights, obviously, this being a thread about whales.

Oh yes, I daresay. I mean to include that sort of thing with "memories" anyway. The drug might not be physically possible in reality.

Premised on being utterly selfish and not caring about Linda.

Leaving that aside, is this really a great and clever question? In version 2, your minds are swapped, so it's the same question. The difference is that you have been "driven crazy" and "deluded", but in what sense? If the objective is to avoid yourself being tortured, it's unclear which one is yourself, simply because the question relies on the unclear fictional process of "making you believe you're the other person", and the question itself implies you shouldn't trust that process.

It could be made shorter: "A mad scientist comes along and does something mysterious, so that you might not be yourself any more! So, are you? Ah, you don't know! Gotcha!"

The original is in Problems of the Self, 1973. (Or it's an essay titled The Self and The Future.) I've got hold of that, am reading. The original version is really long. The first six pages are just really making a meal out of describing all the ramifications of the simple sci-fi concept of a body swap.

Yes, unfortunately it seems to be not very good. "He now further adds that at the moment of torture I shall not only not remember the things I am now in a position to remember, but will have a different set of impressions of my past, quite different from the memories I now have. I do not think that this would cheer me up, either." So, the problem with this is that it's nonsense, like saying "You are not you, but you are! Now if something happens to that person, does it happen to you?" Well I don't know, Bernard, it depends what your rather silly words mean. He's just playing the shell game with the word I.

Then at the end (ten pages later) there's a messier version: "he could have gone on and produced two persons each with A-like character and memories, as well as one or two with B-like characteristics". So it seems that the confusion and non-neatness of the swap is the whole point. Thing is, I'm not even very concerned which one is me. I suppose, alright, I do prefer me-like characteristics. So I'll take the half-dozen clones who seem vaguely right, that's good enough for me. Whatever.

Yes, I am! Why isn't that fine? Not "right", you say.

Bear in mind that the "version of me" is me, and cognitively is in agreement that this is fine. Instinctively I would very much not think it was fine while undergoing the pain, but I'd also think I was wrong about that at the same time. I don't suppose I'd be all stoic about it like Giles Corey*, but it's the cognitive side of me that has the valid opinion and eventually the executive function.

*Squashed to death in Salem, 1692

No, there's a difference, in that my clone would get PTSD or some similar trauma as a result, which is a waste of a large part of that clone's life. In the version where I'm drugged into forgetfulness, I've only wasted a day, for science and profit.

Got to be philosophical about it all.