devishard

> To me, free will is the lack of external forces controlling my decisions and actions. That is, I can decide things for myself, even if those decisions are a deterministic product of my current state.

Without some place in the sequence of events that isn't deterministic, I don't see how you can separate your current state from external forces. That is, if your decisions are a deterministic product of your current state and your current state is a deterministic product of other states before it (including states that existed before you did, such as your parents) then I don't see that as "the lack of external forces controlling my decisions and actions".

> How are you defining it such that it must be non-deterministic and distinct from randomness? I don't really understand what that means. Assuming there's a single shared reality, what's the source of the non-determinism? Even if you say that's the free will itself, you'd be asserting that our "wills" are somehow capable of randomness.

Part of the difficulty with talking about free will is that there isn't a clear definition of what it is. However, I do think I can say what it isn't--I think most people don't consider randomness or determinism to be free will. But I also think that it would be nigh impossible to distinguish randomness from free will without a clearer definition of free will.

The fallout of this belief is that I think we could disprove free will if we could prove determinism (but, I don't think we can prove determinism currently). But I don't think we can prove free will, even if we could disprove determinism (I don't think we can do that either). In order to prove free will we would have to disprove both determinism and randomness.

> I don't think that is evident at all. Clear writing will resonate with the reader far more than hackneyed, pretentious constructions.

Then why are all the most popular news sources full of clickbait, inflammatory headlines, and cliffhanger hooks?

> Many of the best communicators in history successfully employed "simpler" verbal constructions than those Orwell rails against.

History is written by historians, and historians are biased toward things that interest them. Simpler verbal constructions might get written about more by an educated historian, but that doesn't necessarily mean they were the most influential in their time.

Right, mine too, but it's highly dangerous to assume that your experience is the majority experience. Look at which news sources are popular, and you won't find a single one that writes in a direct style.

Also, realize that people writing NewSpeak have gotten better at it since Orwell wrote this.

> I would likely not use it as a main source of truth for any application but for a lot of things, it's a good database.

I really don't understand this. In what case is it every acceptable for a data store to lose data? And that's not even MongoDB's only problem: it memory leaks!

I'm usually against absolutes, but I'm really in agreement here. It's almost always better to use a relational database, and in the rare cases where you wouldn't want a relational database, MongoDB is the worst of the major options. It literally memory leaks and drops data without warning or provocation. If you're not going to go with a relational database, RethinkDB, Cassandra, Redis, or BerkeleyDB would all be better choices (which one depends on situation).

That's not what superdeterminism would indicate at all.

"Conspiracy" indicates free will on a large number of actors.

And a superdeterministic system could exist which differs from standard ways of approaching quantum mechanics. One obvious way in which it could exist is if our means of gathering data remain as limited as they are currently--i.e. we don't ever find a way around Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and therefore can't ever model quanta deterministically. Superdeterminism doesn't mean that we'd always be able to measure the deterministic phenomena.

> I don't see how subjective experience, i.e. consciousness, can come about from purely material interactions as currently understood. That means that a Turing Machine would be able to produce them, which means that a bunch of monks working with paper and pencil for thousands of years would be able to produce them.

Not without input data, they couldn't. You can produce a model, but unless you collect data to validate your model against, you're just speculating in a void.

> There's something fundamental that we don't understand and the scientific community is very opposed to talking about it, dismissing any and all speculation as quackery.

We're talking about it right now, and I haven't heard anyone opposed to talking about it.

However, I'll fully dismiss opinions as quackery if they clearly misrepresent the facts, i.e. claims that Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle or Bell's Inequalities prove free will are quackery. This isn't because the ideas are taboo or because I'm opposed to talking about them, it's because they're misrepresentations or misunderstandings of facts which are clearly established.

In my experience, when people claim that scientists are opposed to talking about their hypothesis, it's because their hypothesis has been thoroughly and concretely disproven.

We all understand fear and love and curiosity well enough that we can make rudimentary predictions about them. If I point a gun at someone they will experience fear and respond with fight or flight. If I spend a lot of time with someone and certain compatibility conditions are met, we will experience love and respond with caring behaviors. If I show someone something that they don't understand fully but that has properties that interest them, they'll likely experience curiosity and respond with questions and exploration.

Someone who studies these things (a psychologist or neurologist) could make even more sophisticated predictions.

We may not have a complete low-level electrochemical model of these phenomenon, but we have a good enough model to make some predictions. But if anything, one of the most salient criticisms of free will is that it doesn't allow us to model and make predictions--in fact, it eschews predictions altogether.

> With no notion of free will, how do we distinguish between manslaughter and murder?

I'd argue that the distinction is not indicative of a phenomenon that exists.

I think a much better model would be predictive and preventive rather than punitive--the level assignment to rehabilitation should be based on the probability and severity of recidivism, rather than the level of punishment being based on the severity of the crime.

> It seems like, punishment would need to be interpreted purely as societal cost. So you tally up the wreckage from the car accident example above, say $25,000 and 2 lives.

I don't think so. I think determinism makes "punishment" as a concept, completely nonsensical--you can't punish someone for something they didn't choose to do. I think determinism pushes the focus to rehabilitation rather than punishment, which for many types of crimes (i.e. drug use, computer hacking, nonviolent robbery) is clearly more effective in preventing recidivism (and I'd argue that for crimes where it's not effective, that we haven't really explored rehabilititation because of the widespread belief in free will).

> I don't really see how we can have both manslaughter and murder, without free will. What extra thing did the angry guy do? He didn't make a choice, because (for the sake of argument) he has no free will. What is the characteristic that makes what he did worse? The cost to society is the same.

Agreed. But does this highlight a problem with a deterministic world view, or does it highlight a problem with the distinction between manslaughter and murder?

> Even if we don't have free will, it's better to pretend we do. There is a difference between a driver that falls asleep at the wheel and causes an accident and a driver that flies into a rage and crashes their car into another driver. It's hard to justify the distinction if neither driver has a choice. I'd argue it's better for society to maintain that distinction.

The distinction still matters without free will, because it's still a predictor of future behavior. A driver who crashes because of a preventable cause shouldn't be allowed to drive until the problem is resolved. If the problem is falling asleep, the solution may be simple (get more sleep?) or hard (narcolepsy), while anger issues are probably pretty difficult to provably solve.

Belief in free will has some seriously harmful effects on the way we deal with these situations. Most notably, it's the basis for a focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation. Deterrents don't work, largely because they don't fix the causes for bad behavior. Rehabilitation is the only sensible approach if you don't believe in free will, whereas punishment makes a bit more sense if you believe that people have free will.

> Perhaps someone can reframe that in terms of types of error, and people prone to more serious types of error (road rage) face different consequences. But that gets real complicated real quick.

This is fundamentally a free-will-based way of seeing the problem. "Consequences" are completely irrelevant in a deterministic worldview unless you can prove that they act as a deterrent (that is, that they are part of the cause). Since consequences are provably not significant deterrents for many crimes, I don't think that works.

Your argument basically that "this idea of punishment/consequences (which only makes sense in a free-will-based ideology) doesn't work in a deterministic ideology, and punishment/consequences are good in my free-will-based ideology, therefore deterministic ideologies are wrong". But you have to hold a free-will-based ideology for the preconditions of your argument to make sense.

That's the argument I use for not believing in assertions of existence ("God exists", "Pink unicorns exist"), because people basically don't think things exist that can't be proven to exist, but make a special pleading for Gods.

I guess you could argue that we generally assume a deterministic model exists and try to find it, but I hadn't considered that before.

> Many people believe that free will and determinism are not incompatible (compatibilists).

Could you explain how that works? I'm unfamiliar with that, but I suspect that they may be using a different definition of "free will" than I am familiar with.

> Personally, I'm not even sure introducing non-determinism matters much. What would it even mean? That beyond determinsitic actions defined by our precise history, we get a bit of randomness permuting the whole thing? Does that really make it any freer?

I think free will and randomness are both forms of non-determinism. Non-determinism doesn't prove free will, but it allows for the possibility that it might exist (and post people intuit that randomness could be indistinguishable from non-determinism).

Quantum effects are part of brain activity because they underly all electrochemistry--that's never been in question. The question is whether those quantum effects impart any non-determinism to the brain system, and the link you posted doesn't make any claims that they do or don't.

Give me a product that works over any of those.

I'd buy that logic if it produced low defect rates and high uptime, but it doesn't. When we used SilverPop earlier this year it was down about 5% of the time and wrong 5% of the time, and even the basic way the interfaces we had to integrate with worked was a mess.

I don't think their process is heavy because it's rigorous, I think it's heavy because it's a reflection of their corporate structure (which is large).

IBM's reputation is utterly nonsensical. I've worked for a company bought by IBM and for companies that used IBM's products/services and they've never been anything other than mediocre, sometimes outright bad, with costs that are astronomical.

My recommendation is that if you ever think about using an IBM product, hire a developer instead. You'll pay less money for a developer than you would pay for an IBM product, and after they're done implementing a the product better whatever unreliable enterprise clusterfuck IBM would shoehorn into your "solution", you have a developer who can work on other things.

What's frustrating about Orwell's writing advice here is that it doesn't really improve society unless everyone does it. If I write using Orwell's rules and my political opponent doesn't, I'll likely lose.

If anything, I wish that the phenomenon Orwell is describing would be used by the people on the "right" side more often--but people who are doing what they think is right don't as often feel the need to obfuscate it for PR purposes.

Ultimately I think understanding the phenomenon Orwell describes is fundamental. You should be able to read "Two died after a shooting incident involving LAPD officers" and know to look further to discover that meant "LAPD shot and killed two unarmed black men". But actually following Orwell's advice on how to write puts you at a disadvantage. Playing by the rules when your opponents aren't is a fool's game.

This headline is offensively stupid. Of course it can be explained, we just haven't explained it yet.

"Orwellian" is totally a thing, but I don't think that when people say "Orwellian" they are talking about Orwell's ideology--they're usually talking about the kinds of problems that Orwell wrote about in 1984 and Politics and the English Language. It's analogous to how some diseases are named after the doctors who identified them--obviously the doctor doesn't cause the disease or want it to happen, they simply identified it.

The free will conversations drive me insane. People can't shut up about how Heisenberg's uncertainty principle proves random phenomena (which isn't exactly true) but worse, they insist it indicates that we have free will.

But a) what it really indicates is that it would be unmeasurable whether we have free will, and b) it also doesn't really prove that, because while electron positions are unpredictable, molecular reactions, the sort that happen in the human brain are pretty predictable.

Basically, my response to this is "That would be relevant if we had black holes or large hadron colliders in our heads, but we don't, so...". But people really really want to believe in free will and will use any sliver of half-truth to believe they've proved it.

EDIT: To be clear, I do not believe free will has been proven OR disproven.

EDIT 2: More sophisticated wrong people argue from Bell's Inequalities rather than the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, but that also results from a misunderstanding of the theory and also neither proves nor disproves determinism.

Freedoms 1-3 exist with BSD, too, they just aren't protected.

There are few cases where freedom 0 exists without the other 3, but one case where that's true is with some of the Microsoft tooling around the CLR. In such cases, I, as someone who doesn't know low-level Windows programming, can't realistically change the software myself, but I could pay someone else to do it. But since I don't have freedoms 1-3, my only option is to pay MS if I want that modification. There is a very small group of people in the world who can afford to pay Microsoft for customizations. So even as someone who would never make modifications to the software, I care (and my boss who wasn't even a developer would care) because we had to work around limitations of our tools rather than paying someone to fix them.

Do you remember when Internet Explorer was the only kid on the block, and then Firefox came out and was a breath of fresh air? I know a lot of non-programmers who cared about that, and that's a direct result of the ability for anyone to modify software. Remember that Firefox was based on Netscape, which had previously been knocked out of existence by IE. The difference between Netscape and Firefox was freedom to distribute modifications, and that made a lot of difference to a lot of users.

> I never quite got why GNU decided to consider the freedom to access the source code and the freedom to modify it as a single bullet point. To me, they're fundamentally distinct concepts, and furthermore the former is VASTLY more important than the latter.

They're fundamentally different for the purpose you're describing, but remember that your goal in this case is your goal. Stallman is protecting the freedom of software for any goal.

Besides, both freedoms are protected unequivocally without compromise by the definition. Saying the right to access the source code is more important than the right to modify it only matters if you plan to prioritize one over the other.

Mathematically yes, there's nothing preventing ETC from doing the same thing. But ideologically, the lines have been drawn. At least for the time being, I think it's a safe bet that people who aren't committed to decentralization will just go with ETH instead of investing in ETC and voting for future forks.

Again though, I think the design of both cryptocurrencies is prohibitively error-prone, so it's kind of a moot point.

> It's astounding, considering both chains are basically the same system

They aren't at all. Immutable smart contracts are the basis of ETC and not ETH. It's only one difference, but it's a difference as fundamental as the difference between gold and dollars.

ETH is now a centralized currency. I have trouble seeing any purpose to using ETH now that it's centralized, given that existing centralized money/contract systems are much more mature. But given both ETH and ETC are too buggy for me to use, I've no skin in the game, so I'm happy to wait and see if some benefit to a centralized cryptocurrency emerges that I wasn't aware of.

The way I see the distinction is that obscurity is about hiding the security mechanism, whereas a key is about hiding one part of the mechanism that can be mathematically analyzed to give an estimate of how long it will take to break it.

The major difference here is this: with security through obscurity, someone can reverse engineer one product and then they've broken all products. This is why someone upstream said "security through obscurity doesn't scale". Security through obscurity is often okay if you're protecting one thing, but if you're using it to protect a system (like a pacemaker) that is going to be used by a lot of people, the more people who use it, the more valuable a reverse engineering hack becomes. Security through obscurity can't be individualized to provide security to each individual--if one system is broken all systems are broken.

Compare this with key-based security--if each instance of the system has an individual, randomized key with a large enough keyspace, breaking a key will only get you into a single instance of the system. It scales because the reward for breaking the security doesn't grow as the number of system instances grows.

Note that the problem with security through obscurity is basically the same problem with master keys, i.e. those used for backdoors or DRM. If someone can obtain the master key for the system, they can break all the instances of the system.

I'll add this to my list of reasons why I'm not on Facebook.

Okay, that wasn't at all clear from what you said, because you used a very bad example (sending checks--this is much easier than sending Bitcoin these days). But if your point is that Bitcoin isn't difficult in some general sense, sure.

If I have to transfer my money into an exchange, wait for it to clear, and then immediately transfer it out into a wallet with a long random address with a random key that I then have to protect, that's not "very little friction" compared to traditional banking. There are many benefits to cryptocurrency, but ease of use is not one of them, and when you claim it is, you come across as out-of-touch with the average user.