monkeypizza

Say there's someone who wants to reduce inequality, and we ask them whether they approve of various scenarios:

Situation: "People living on a certain well-off island discover a way to farm more efficiently, which means they produce 10% more food, but that technology only works on their island. Is this good or bad?"

Inequality reducer: "This is bad, because that island's average income will go up while the rest of the world stays the same"

Situation: "We discover a free, simple cure for Alzheimer's"

Inequality reducer: "That's horrible, because Alzheimer's does the most damage to highly educated countries - those countries will now have way more mentally together, experienced 70-year-olds making them even richer, which will increase economic inequality with poorer countries where fewer people suffer from alzheimer's"

You have got to see this is a bit weird, right? It's a focus on minimizing local distortions sometimes can have a bad effect. In fact, imagine we really did have "equality" - the anti-inequality advocate would object to any change in that world, since it would lead to a temporary bit of inequality as information about the change propagated through it. Even simple things like the first invention of mechanized agriculture, or machines to make clothing, introduced tons of inequality at first, since there was only one copy of them at first! But we're better off now that our civilization doesn't have to devote 50% of everyone's life to growing food & making clothes by hand!

The other way to think about it is that that we just have to make sure everyone has at least a basic level of food, health, education, and freedom. That lets us focus on the main problems (people who don't have enough), and never could lead us into condemning gains in human quality of life.

Focusing solely on wealth inequality leads to strange conclusions:

  The richest people should destroy productive resources

But destroying productive resources (efficient water purifiers, better solar panels, computers that do more computations using less energy) would have been wrong in almost all of history - so why would we adopt beliefs now which make it right?

I think it makes more sense to focus on getting everyone to a basic level of freedom & choice; i.e. good health, good education, and freedom of information.

A successful world is one where everyone has at least these basics. In that world, we don't have to worry if the richest person's swiss bank account balance doubles, or they build a few more mansions. The problem of wealth is the people who don't have enough!

I hope he writes about wechat's grouping function, which is taking off like crazy now.

Group: In a normal chat, you can unilaterally add people to create a group, and it is permanent, and can be named. The creator has kick privileges, but anyone can add more people. So when people have dinner, they'll just add everyone they want to invite and then send the invite, maps, etc. to the group. Then during/after the event, everybody will send photos. Invitees can also add their own people to the group. I have current groups for weekly dinners, old parties, meetups, and work. It's way easier to set up and does much more than google+ / email / whatever it's replacing.

Some groups (for birthdays, etc.) stay around forever, as that person's social hub. Our work group sees a lot of use.

Once a group gets big you can't force-add people (they have to accept invites when the group is 40+). There are also some very touchy issues with leaving - when you leave the whole group gets a message, so people feel stuck in groups, or have to think carefully about how to get out gracefully.

I think this is what google hangouts / wave were meant to be. Not much management required, and unrelated people can be brought in, so it's under many people's control.

It probably won't happen in China, but I'd love to see anonymous messaging groups - you can see who's in the group but not who sent every message. Sort of like 4chan, and another way to allow more people to contribute; it'd also pull out things you won't be able to find out otherwise.

The selection in Ashkenazi was not done in the same way proposed here - filtering took whole lifetimes. In this system, you compress the whole "live 50 years and have slightly more / fewer children" step into one procedure.

This one is equivalent to picking the best one of 50 naturally occurring children, and raising them alone, every generation.

If Michael Jordan he had 50 children with a similarly elite mother, most of them would regress to the mean - but the best one could conceivably be near his level. If he had only one kid, it's very likely that the kid would regress significantly.

Also, of course there are negatives to high IQ but most of the time, this selection method wouldn't be done for that level. Two people of IQ 100 would be able to reliably have children of IQ 115, and those kids would have happier, longer, healthier lives, with no increased risks. [see the scottish IQ study; iq at age 11 was linked to a lifetime of better outcomes]

That is the real benefit of this technology - to give people the option of gradually bringing out the best of what's already inside themselves. I don't want to be forced to give my kids a random selection of my genes - I want to exercise some control. And of course there could be problems - perhaps +IQ genes might lie next to other, undetected bad genes. But that's random, and we're already completely subject to it.

I don't think you even need to think of it on the level of genes (because most of the time, chromosomes are inherited whole (barring crossing over)). So you'd just be picking the best combinations of random selection of chromosomes contributed by the parents.

It's like being able to roll 100 times and picking the best one in D&D character creation. The improvement might not be able to be done infinitely, but could at least get us to everyone having IQ 130, which would mean a reduction in all the problems associated with lower IQ. (Crime, poverty, lack of educational achievement, bad health)

i.e. a father has two variants of chromosome 6, one good and one great. Why not make sure that his kids just "by chance" get the great one? There will be lots of tradeoffs, but it'd always be better to occasionally step in and make a choice than to always accept randomness.

You seem to have missed the author's explanation of how they could get 10-15 IQ points per generation:

"Potentially, the results would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. Given the Mendelian genetic lottery, the kids produced by any one couple typically differ by 5 to 15 IQ points. So this method of "preimplantation embryo selection" might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation."

Stephen Hsu has written more about it here http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2014/10/genius-nautilus-magazin...

That link pops up a login screen for me.

I think we can keep it going for a while, as you say, by continuously absorbing defectors from more fertile populations. But I think if you admit to any genetic component to this at all, there will definitely be genetic flow, with the more fertile populations eventually taking over.

Being "reasonable" and "planning" are just extremely maladaptive in the current world. For example, reproduction in this population is completely dwarfing reproduction of highly educated, self-controlled, non-criminal groups: http://www.amazon.com/Promises-Can-Keep-Motherhood-Marriage/...

The thing you're ignoring is that the easier and cheaper ways involve two people; and the trend among educated individuals in the US is that those people aren't tending to agree to have more children.

Cloning or alternative strategies leave it up to just one person - so no agreement or negotiation is necessary.

The things I mentioned aren't just genetic - culture is also very heritable. So selection will work on that level, too.

The argument about homosexuality is similar to asking why amazon hunters keep getting killed by jaguars - you could "disprove" evolution by asking "why hasn't evolution just selected the ones resistant to jaguars?" But it's because getting as close to danger as possible is an effective strategy. That's one of the more reasonable genetic explanations for for why homosexuality still exists, too.

Is fertility heritable? Some aspects of it certainly are. i.e. lust, passion, lack of self control, working sperm, and mental traits such as the susceptibility to anti-abortion arguments, the desire to have a child in women, and the tendency towards religion are all either already proven to be heritable, or very likely are. I don't think the UN is taking this into account, since it's very un-PC and is mostly fairly recent research.

So as modernity attacks the desire to reproduce (with abortion/birth control, modernity, education, distraction, late marriage, etc.) we end up eliminating people who are vulnerable to not reproducing. The only people left will be ones who are resistant.

So my overall point is, even though the population growth rate may be slowing down, it doesn't mean it'll slow down forever. There are already resistant strains at low frequency in the population now - they will increase in prevalence and become the majority; they'll continuously suffer defections, some of whom will be high achievers due to not spending the time to reproduce, and the mindset that allows them to break away from conventionality - but as long as they don't reproduce, they'll be gone eventually.

I'm surprised no one has talked about atypical reproduction strategies. If someone was the type of person who would like to clone themselves, and they did it 50 times, their kids may be that type of person too (and there would be selection for clone-parents who educate kids to continue the tradition). This would be a locally adaptive behavior, and would end population decline.

This link is somewhat relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mautam

In India there's a species of bamboo that flowers every 48 years; during each flowering, the rat population explodes. Once they've eaten all the bamboo, they turn to anything else they can find.

A system where people can survive and reproduce without working can't end well.

Imagine it in the context of computer resource management - "every program deserves this much RAM and this much CPU". When you have randomly varying, recombining programs, what will the result be after 50 generations? Eventually a program will evolve to reproduce faster, and it will come to dominate the population. Why would you think that such a thing wouldn't happen with human beings, too?

What do you think happens when you provide unlimited free food to a population of rats? A few continue being "productive" - searching for new food supplies, etc. but they get out-reproduced by the ones who just eat all day. So the population explodes, eventually the food runs out, and then they all die.

So overall I think that a global basic income, combined with unlimited reproduction, would have a horrible outcome for humanity.

Consider this hypothetical situation:

A game in which for evenly matched players, in a match of 1000 games, 9 are wins for white, 1 is a win for black, and 990 are draws. Would it really be reasonable there to say that W has a massive 90% advantage? I don't think so - in that situation white only has a tiny average advantage per game, so that winning such a match would mostly depend on real skill differences.

Can't the NSA just monitor the whole network to detect anyone else using an exploit? So once they discover one, just use it to their heart's content until they start seeing it in the wild. At that point, disclose it.

The idea that everyone is born with the same fitness level is rather crazy to me. For one thing there's things like fetal alcohol syndrome, malnourished mothers, radiation damage before birth. But much more than that there are recognized genetic disorders, which at the extremes nobody would say confer the same fitness - down's syndrome etc.

Is there any reason to believe that genetic issues obey a distribution where they are either very extreme, or have no effect at all? i.e. if everyone not classifiable as having a really extreme disease is equal? I don't think so.

I think it's much more likely that there is a normal distribution of breakdowns in fitness - a few very severe problems which manage to survive to birth, then many, many more variants with negative fitness, or ones which are good but very picky, and which may be left over from environments where they were +fitness. Then there are probably variants which are all-around good.

So the idea that we're all born with the same fitness level is a pretty extreme example of invalid "blank slate" type thinking.

http://www.hacker.org/bitbath/ is a really nice one in Java.

And this one is ok, http://berlin-ai.com/ - you just provide the URL of your AI and they POST game states to you, and you have 5 seconds to reply with your orders.

You are forgetting about all the life support systems that no longer need to be included / maintained. Oxygen tanks, ejector seat, etc.

an idea about Elon Musk announcing a plan to fund 100 women/year to have his children through sperm banks, in 10 generations (1 generation/year), with fully paid support and tutoring for life for the kids, and regularly schedule reunions of generations / the whole group.

It was at attempt to re-introduce cloning style massively parallel reproduction to the human species.

That was what I thought this story would be about.

Seriously though, don't you think Snowden could get a few hundred extremely smart, civil libertarian women to agree to bear his children?

Why is everybody so negative about this? He's doing something weird, but he is still leaving himself open to scientific evidence, which is better than the average mystical / religious diet recommendation (chinese medicine, hinduism, vegetarianism) which mostly do not accept scientific evidence, and instead do their diets for unassailable moral/mystical reasons (balancing "qi", balancing hot/cold foods, purity obsessions, etc.)

People survive on life rafts eating flying fish and drinking rain water, for months at a time. Most people using soylent will not eat it for all their meals, and they will almost always be surrounded by other food they can eat if they start feeling bad. So I don't think it's a big deal, let him do what he wants!

I signed up for their free trial, and when it expired they sent me DAILY all caps messages (with no opt-out, no autologin link, from a noreply address) screaming at me about needing to update my credit card details.

I like their service & want more people to leave gmail, so I signed up to make a suppor request (which I had to verify in true listserv fashion) and wrote a ticket trying to explain how lots of people who signed up would be expecting a web 2.0 style try & buy trial, not a real subscription service that would send them bills! And those people would be turned off by their aggro emails, but didn't seem to get through to the guy on the other end.

So I think fastmail is still pretty oldschool internally (which is a good thing on the security & privacy aspects!) and would be well-served making more modern demos and explanations so they can directly suck people into a non-NSA gmail competitor that has a sweet UI with keyboard shortcuts, good searching etc.

It's interesting you assume he was being racist, rather than culturalist. I think it's equally valid to assume he was talking about mainland Chinese business culture.

Is it controversial to say that mainland Chinese companies (as we're talking about here) commonly steal or clone business plans?

I don't believe batteries are solid units - I think they are made up of thousands of individual smaller batteries. So Tesla can probably swap out the smaller pieces in chunks to keep any one battery from getting too bad.

Doesn't everyone just fill in 90210?

or does give away my age...

This is what's happening in China now. They've had the great firewall for 10 years - what's happening since then has been further development of ways to manage what people think. So they allow weibo, etc. to work, and are figuring out how to control the message.

By controlling a few birds at the right moment, you can control where the whole flock goes, and it still thinks it's free.

This mistake seems to be getting more and more common.

I use the example of sea turtles - the average lifespan across a clutch of eggs is maybe 1 year - because one out of 100 survives. But the one that survives usually lives for 100+ years. The fact that the life expectancy at hatching is only one year tells you nothing about the distribution.

Yes. Luckily, Avalon has a philosophical committment to improving the bitcoin transaction network.

Other suppliers which haven't established this idea can be accused of receiving orders and just running them locally for a while before sending them out.

The utility function for money for humans is not uniform.

Also, people hate to lose money. i.e. the difference between losing 1 dollar and breaking even is not large in fact, but is really large in mind. Even people who recognize this is irrational still suffer if feel they have lost money - so, removing this suffering is valuable to them.

If you only have 10 btc, selling one to break even lifetime will permanently mean you did not lose money. If btc go to a million each, an extra million will not make much difference, since utility of money at the top is much less than at the bottom.

Therefore I think it makes perfect sense for humans who bought btc cheaply to sell fractions of their total holdings to remove the possibility of losing money on btc overall.

Bitcointalk likes it.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=164977.0;all