manifestsilence

Thank you so much for reading this and for your kind words. It means a lot to be heard.

Regarding the final point, about whether there is a way to "quit the ant game", I think there may sort of be one in the future. The article doesn't account for the possibility of there being only one ant colony that has dominated the entire area, thus eliminating the competitive aspect of its evolution.

I think we are a long way off from even a world government in name, and if and when we first get there it will perhaps be like the wild west in that there is a loose sense of a government presence but much conflict is still settled locally. But if the centralized powers become strong enough, eventually they could effectively end war, with massive economic ramifications as that expense is diverted elsewhere. Obviously there would still be peacekeeping forces, but those would be a massive deescalation compared to the current state of the world.

The danger of this centralization, of course, is that all the eggs are then in one basket. Corruption of that society means corruption of all of humanity. But the cost-benefit of even enslavement under such a government may be worth it on the whole. It doesn't look like it when you're living in a place not ravaged by war, but a world dictator would be better than being in a country being bombed and mined (in both senses of the word) over and over again. And who knows, perhaps we could have a world government some day that is democratic, and our biggest battles will be protests and politics. Call me naive. :)

Moral of that story: these things are weak to cable tripping.

Yeah, that's fair. But I'd put it in the category of like sci-fi movies (she's obviously based on Hal from 2001), and Portal 2 has movie-equivalent levels of storyline.

I think it's an art form in its infancy, and that different arts have different levels of both time spent and depth of understanding gained by taking them in. How much does a painting teach you about the human condition?

Classical can get pretty metal, for sure. :) Wagner and Mahler come to mind.

On a totally different note - have you listened to Them Crooked Vultures? John Paul Jones, formerly Led Zeppelin, playing distorted console steel is pretty wild.

Yeah, that could be. It's a young genre and I think that paintings from before perspective became systematically understood are super awkward. That's a cool thought. I'm totally okay with blowing some hours to experience the Hamlet of games.

Some video games that explore the human condition and could be said to be Art with the capital A:

The Stanley Parable (deconstruction of what it is to play a game. It starts with a third person narration of your character being at work, pushing buttons all day without being quite sure why, and proceeds into multiple endings that deconstruct reality in quite creative ways that sometimes break the fourth wall)

Braid (Mario clone, but you can rewind time and there's a story line that riffs on the old Mario memes but uses them as a metaphor for the atomic bomb)

Dragon Age: Origins (DnD based game with excessively fiddly combat but a fairly massive branching story line, asking the user to make many moral choices, with outcomes ranging from mostly happy to everybody dies)

Portal I and II (notable for their sci-fi dystopian narrator GlaDOS, who is voice acted by an opera singer who plays a computer that has gone insane)

A lot of what computer games do as an art form is fundamentally different than other genres - their chief advantage is interactivity, which is something we haven't known what to do with in art very much prior to this, other than a handful of plays that break the fourth wall.

This interactivity allows for experiments in the concept of community and alternative models of fairness and social status. The reason I still would qualify these as art is that they are exploring these spaces in a non-systematic and intuitive manner rather than an academic one.

This puts MMOs at the top of the medium as an example of what games can do to explore the human condition. They can be life-consuming and addictive, but they explore alternative identities, economies, and social systems in a way and on a scale that no purely intellectual endeavor detached from real economic and political consequences has ever done before. As to what we take from this, I'm not sure other than World of Warcraft has taught me how naive libertarian economics can be given how completely a player was able to take over the entire server economy on one server by just buying low and selling high until his economic advantage was sufficient to control the market.

The only part of this I really agree with is that the music industry is harming artists more than usual. It is a meme at least as old as jazz or even older (Baroque music was so-named because it was said to be lopsided, like a misshapen pearl) that music ain't what it used to be.

There is still great music being made, and the really deep stuff has always gotten ignored by most people most of the time. Heck, I majored in music and I don't listen to Bach or Coltrane every day. That stuff is too rich for every occasion.

I'd say that innovation within genres - just people making good songs - is every bit as important as creating new genres. New genres aren't automatically created at a certain rate. They're an event, triggered by major social changes or new cultural influences most of the time. For America to invent a new genre we might need to conquer or be conquered by someone else, or have a new wave of immigration.

Some good artists currently making popular music with depth and interest off the top of my head:

St. Vincent, Dessa, Chris Thile, SquarePusher, BJ Cole, Run the Jewels, Billy Joel (I list him here because rather than just repeating his same hits forever, he went and recently released a classical-style piano album that's quite good, so he's still growing and changing as an artist), Tori Amos (she's been making music a long time but has a new style every decade or so).

So people who are fit enough to pass active duty basic training tend not to have symptoms. Solution: put everyone through basic training?

Does anyone else feel like this study is a bit tautological in that it's measuring attributes that are valued by the AA method? Many other methods don't preach abstinence so of course they're going to get less total abstinence duration. But I wonder if there are better ways to measure overall effectiveness and well-being. Some people learn to manage their drink and would fare poorly on that metric.

This is an interesting debate, and one where I fear the young generation's attitudes seem to differ. My 16yo says she'd rather get targeted ads than non, because it's just more relevant and she might want to buy those things. She has zero concern about the psychological manipulation factor and assumes she will just say no if she doesn't want a product.

I guess I can see where she's coming from, as I don't avoid physical stores when I'm not planning to buy things. Window shopping is fun. But still, I think all that tracking has a dark side that's difficult to convey to the generation that grew up taking it for granted. Are we just old and fear the new and unknown?

The one thing I definitely hate is how bloated the web has gotten. Everything works great on my old computers that I switched over to linux, until I need to just google (duckduckgo) some simple piece of information on a forum. And then I find myself fantasizing about upgrading to an i7 so I can read the same basic text that could be read online when 1ghz processors were a pipe dream.

Edit: and this is with ad blockers and anti-trackers turned on. The whole browser experience is just slower, and I think the act of having to scan and block all that cruft must have an impact. Browsers used to function on Windows XP machines back in the day, right?

Edit2: and then I see this thread on the HN front page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22054715

These would be less than convenient to type, but perhaps as we go more and more towards a non-typing web where a walled-garden start page and predefined links lead to the most popular sites with a click, these URLs will become fashionable. I think if so, this will herald the impending death of the human-read and typed URL in favor of start page links and search results.

Mashed it might stick together. The whole grains are way less sticky on the outside than rice.

Yeah, that's a lot of Hofstadter's thesis in Godel, Escher, Bach. In his long, rambling way, he eventually gets into the subtle differences between the different formulations of the Church-Turing thesis and argues that all consciousness is the same kind of epiphenomenon as a computer and thus subject to the same rules.

For me, music is often the lesser of two evils compared to the background noise of the open office or the noise of the conversation going on in my own head. It also gives me a happiness fix which helps me not burn out and distract myself in other ways.

For me, it really depends on my mood and what I'm working on which type of music is appropriate. Some days it's rap and the flood of words doesn't get in the way even. Other days it has to be instrumental bluegrass or similar.

One could say that about the U.S. highway system too, though. And some do, advocating the privatized highways some states have adopted. But I would argue that things like internet and highway do not make sense to be privatized because they are inherently centralized and monopolistic - you can't have two competing sets of roads in the same location, and can only have so many cables going through the same neighborhood. It's a massive inefficiency to let the free market do its work in these regions and leads to monopolistic behaviors. Since nearly everyone uses internet and to a relatively consistent degree, it's a pretty reasonable candidate for centralized subsidy and/or control.

No. There is a crucial distinction here. Hate speech that is only mean is one thing and should be protected. Hate speech that incites violence against a particular individual or group is not protected speech. This includes a few things said by the current POTUS, such as (approximate quote from memory), "maybe the guy should be roughed up", said of a guy who was currently being roughly physically removed from his rally. Speech to incite violence is not protected by the first amendment and should not be.

There has been a lot of mixing of concepts in this space lately. There is the legal question of government interference with speech, protected by the First Amendment in the US. Then there is the moral issue of deplatforming by corporations. Then there is the moral issue of groups of people bullying a dissenting viewpoint. These are different issues with different levels of severity and different solutions.

Anyone who has only been deplatformed and is complaining that the world is becoming authoritarian needs to realize that this has always been the way of the world. Forever. There has never been a time in history when someone could voice an unpopular view or be seen as an unpopular identity and not receive public ridicule, shame, or retribution of some kind, and where companies censored no content whatsoever.

What America, and other nations who value freedom, have is a protection against government interference. Let's keep it that way and accept that people are jerks to each other and not everyone wants to hear what you have to say.

True. And "cancel culture" has always been the way things are. It's nothing new. It's just we used to "cancel" people for things like being gay or socialist. No one likes to be on the unpopular side of the social spectrum, but then again, no one is guaranteed a platform or an audience, only the right to speak to those who will listen willingly.

We do have laws to limit free speech in good and specific ways. You can't slander a person who isn't famous, for example, or incite violence against specific people or groups. And most of the cries of free speech being violated aren't really about the first amendment. Most are just people being deplatformed, which is a reminder that YouTube is just Google. It's a company, not a public space.

It's such an important distinction though. When people do it, it's just dissenting voices. When a platform removes someone, they can just find another platform. Twitter doesn't owe anyone a voice on it.

But when the government says you can't talk about a thing, they can make you take it down everywhere. Only this is protected, and this line needs to not be crossed.

I little sympathy for people getting upset at being deplatformed - they can go elsewhere, and their cries of freedom of expression cry wolf to the constitutional issue of those in power doing actual oppression.

This is an important distinction. Consensus does not mean agreement. Not everyone has to think the idea is the best or even good, they just need to all accept it as viable.

It seems that "group-think" is more about agreement than consensus. An insistence on agreement silences opposing views. A search for consensus entertains them all but recognizes the need for a group decision to be reached.

And you know how the 3 laws turned out in Asimov's world...

Seriously though, I don't think Asimov was being naive with his choice of laws and then showing how they were then subverted. I'm sure he was aware of things like Godel's proofs and the difficulties involved with fuzzy logic and AI.

Asimov kept his laws simple so they would work in a story, but was likely well-aware that real laws could be made more nuanced and that they inevitably would still fail in the ways he described.

Implementation is going to be very, very hard to get right, if at all possible.

Not sure about horses specifically, but humans are uniquely adapted to long distance travel among large land animals and used it for hunting by out-performing most other species:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

Edit: it's one of two things I know of that we really excel at besides thinking. The other being accurate throwing, which perhaps explains baseball's enduring appeal:

https://what-if.xkcd.com/44/

I think the appeal of the syntax for those who get used to it is the regularity, like you said.

The advantage of the regularity isn't its human readability, but its ability to macro, no?

What I'd like to see is better tools for reading and editing such a regular syntax. Probably I should just learn emacs, but I'm thinking someone could make a more intuitive structured editor for LISP syntax. No need to mush around blobs of text when everything is nested lists.

The python ones, Hy and Pixie, look pretty cool. Two very different takes on what it means to "use python" for a lisp.

Pixie uses the RPython toolchain and is totally its own language, with its own VM and JIT.

Hy appears to be python with lisp syntax.

Both sound fascinating.

Yeah, this could help a lot. Scaling based on the past response rate of the sender and how many messages the sender has sent recently would make the pricing more relative, and thus prevent a basic enumeration of "prices of people".

It would also go a long way to not have these prices be listed on a catalog page, but only when clicked into an individual person, so it's less of a feeling of comparison shopping.

The psychology of these UI design things matters a lot.

This is interesting, as this appears to be similar to the difference between Daniel Kahneman's System1 and System2 modes of human thought. ML is perhaps beginning to approach our subconscious, associative intelligence. This shows up in its excellence for things like image processing, which we do instantly and automatically. Perhaps growing the tech equivalent of a prefrontal cortex is what's going to be hard, or require a different approach.

23 hours involuntary solitary confinement is legit confirmed psychological torture. Self-inflicting that is either self-harm or else you are doing meaningful activities indoors and it's not the same thing at all.

I think what you said about condoms highlights a key historical difference. Throughout most of humanity's moral development, there was no such thing as protection, against STDs or pregnancy, other than the rhythm method or induced abortion. Definitely, there was wisdom in limiting the number of partners and orifices in much of that time.

Edit: which is to say, technology can affect morality and there's a good reason for these attitudes to change now.

Also, what you said about Jesus and poverty is spot-on. I really wish more Christians would embrace the truly good and radical parts of Christianity instead of fixating on arcane moral rules.