pyrois

Why is knowing how to open an IDE or set up a mail server a prerequisite for good governance?

People really like to trash Freud, but you have to put him into context. Before Freud, we had a few branches of psychology: philosophical psychology in England arguing about empiricism vs. nativism, Wundtian psychology in Germany sitting around asking very specific questions that they answered using introspection, and in the States we had the very first blossoming of the behaviorism that would dominate psychology in the States until the '60s[0]. Some of these approaches had a concept of the subconscious, but they all viewed it as a static warehouse for previous experience, and very few people thought about it in a serious way.

Freud's major contribution to psychology was that we actually have a dynamic subconscious that profoundly affects how we live our lives. This aspect of his theory has become so ingrained in our culture that it's hard to imagine the world before Freud. Also, that aspect of his theory has held up over the years.

Also, he got a number of things correct: many of his coping mechanisms have strong empirical support, for instance.

Freud was wrong in detail, but his overarching approach changed psychology for the better.

[0] Yes, I know this "history" is a vast oversimplification.

Well, it sounds like they maybe shouldn't be:

> “Uber and Lyft can survive classifying drivers as employees,” she says. “It might cost them a little more, but it’s a successful concept. It’s not going to go away because we are trying to enforce the rules

> And several on-demand companies, such as the house cleaning start-up MyClean and the food delivery service Munchery, already treat their workers as W-2 employees. These companies’ labor costs are higher than their 1099-dependent rivals, but they get additional benefits, such as being able to train their workers and hold them to consistent schedules.

I wonder if Uber is fighting this because it will cut into profit margins and raise overhead costs, rather than because it is an existential threat. There seems to be two different opinions presented in the article (though I'm not educated enough in this area to be able to tell which one is closer to being right).

I'm not sure how easily one could leave a small town in, say, feudal Europe. Most serfs lacked travel rights, and while one could escape from their lord's land and move to a city (depending on the country), the cost was prohibitively high[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom#Villeins

Compared to...? Because, compared to, you know, actual 5 star hotels, they kinda suck.

Yeah, that's the author's guess as well.

> And when I say "people" I mean mostly "algorithms," which are faster and more literal than humans.

That looks fine to me. He's talking about reducing a matrix to reduced row echelon form, and gives a pretty clear example. If you're giving yourself 4 pages on linear algebra, there's not much better you can do.

That said, you're not going to learn linear algebra in four pages. No royal road, and all that.

Sure, they are commensurate at some point. I'd pick one nanosecond of torture over the dust-motes, for instance. But I'm not certain that I would ever choose the 50 years of torture over the dust motes for any number of dust-moted people. That's because it's not continuous, so you can't do the sort of epsilon-delta proofs that Yudkowsky's argument depends on.

At least, in my opinion.

He's assuming linearity, which at the very least needs justification. He's assuming that the function that maps from the pair (number of people, type of torture) to suffering is linear in the number of people, and also linear in the type of torture. I don't believe either of those things are true.

To put it more clearly, he says: > So we can keep doing this, gradually - very gradually - diminishing the degree of discomfort

And I don't agree that you can. The difference between dust-mote and torture is not one of degree, but one of _kind_. It's a discontinuous function (in my opinion). I don't know where the discontinuity is, but it's there.

Yes, I agree, I would take the risk, but those are two entirely different things. It's not the same argument framed in a different way at all.

In Yudkowsky's argument, it's the option between one person _absolutely guaranteed_ to have 50 years of torture, vs 3^^^3 people _absolutely guaranteed_ to be dust-moted. I think the guarantee changes things significantly.

Fair enough. I should have said "the model fails to accurately reflect my sense of morality".

I'll give it a shot, but first, a list of disclaimers: Yudkowsky gets a ton of unjustified internet hate and scorn, and I disagree with a lot of it. I read a number of the sequences, and quite enjoyed them. I also think his reaction to Roko's Basilisk was pretty reasonable: someone on your form comes up with a way to basically guarantee eternal torture for anyone who reads it, and then posts it, thus guaranteeing eternal torture for your forum readers? Who cares that the idea won't actually guarantee any such thing, Roko _thought_ that it might; I would be pissed as hell.

Anyway, my point is, I'm only offering a gentle and hopefully reasoned disagreement with someone I regard highly. I'm not jumping on the "fuck that guy" train. Moving on.

There was a post that boiled down to the question "Would you rather 3 ||| 3 people (where | is an ascii stand-in for Knuth's up-arrow notation) get a mote of dust in their eye, or one person be horrifically tortured for 50 years?" and his conclusion was basically "you can use math to assign some incredibly small epsilon of suffering to getting a mote of dust in your eye, but eventually, if you sum enough people, it's more suffering overall than one poor person getting horrifically tortured". My problem with his post was that I think that any morality scheme that results in the person getting tortured is fundamentally flawed, and I don't care how much math you throw at me to try and "prove" that it's better.

I don't think I've ever heard of an attempt to rigorously derive morality that I agree with. Morality is too contextual, too messy, for us to perfectly capture in those sorts of models. It's especially bad when we try and model morality mathematically, and then take as gospel the result of that model, rather than say "oh, um, that's not a great result, the model must be wrong".

I quite liked his introduction! Be aware, however, that he dramatically overstates some things. For example, he claims that the many-worlds interpretation is obviously correct. This is basically wrong: it may be correct, but it certainly isn't obviously correct, and many scientists whose entire research is dedicated to quantum mechanics would disagree that many-worlds is correct at all.

There is a long list of alternative explanations[0], with very little evidence to lend support to or contradict any of them (at least, any of the ones that are still around. Some have fallen by the wayside).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretations_of_quantum_mec...

The linked paper does not suggest that Martians built nuclear reactors on Mars, which then melted down. The paper suggests that there were "large fireballs in the atmosphere such as Tunguska-like events , with mid-air explosions, but of much greater energy release than Tunguska".

How is that a real patent? As far as I can tell (and I'm not a lawyer), they're patenting mixing protein, carbohydrates, fats, and water in specific ratios to make a meat substitute. Why isn't every veggie burger ever prior art in this case?

I just donated $30. If there is nothing to stop large companies completely ignoring the GPL then what good is it?

True, but even "Chess lite" in 672 bytes is mind-blowing.

"Memory" means RAM, here.

As for why the size of the executable matters, you needed to have the entire executable in RAM before you could actually execute it. That's not so true these days, but it was back in the good ol' days* when you hooked tape cassettes up as your external storage.

* Get off my lawn!

Fight over parking spaces. It's Boston's favorite winter pastime.

It is certainly more complex than that, but I think that a back-of-the-envelope calculation like the one above is more than enough to strongly suggest that getting a solid object to remain in place when the moon is above it and not when the moon is below is very unlikely to be feasible.

I did, thanks!

Probably not. The moon has a mass of about 7.34e22 kg, the minimum distance from the moon to the surface of the earth is about 363,104 km, or 363,104,000 meters, and the constant of proportionality for gravity is G = 6.673e-11 N m^2/kg^2, so the attraction between the Earth and a 1kg object on the surface of the Earth is 3.7e-5, or about 8.3e-6 pounds force. That's not much to work with.

(Did I do that right?)

I think you're conflating several issues.

I don't think it's a choice between "race to the bottom" or "race to the top". Someone needs to do dangerous, nasty, repetitive jobs if we want to maintain a standard of living that many people have become used to. Creatures with the sort of agency you're describing are, in my opinion, unsuited to those tasks, for several reasons, including moral and economic reasons. The robots we are increasingly using to do those jobs are much better suited, and there isn't (again, in my opinion) a moral objection that solely applies to such machines.

That said, our policies are woefully out of date in the face of such increasing automation. Our current system inflates employment and even a meager standard of living. We are going to need to revise our polices, both in the more developed nations and in those that have, as you so tastefully put it, "different labor standards". I don't know how to do this. There are many proposals; a popular one is the basic income guarantee. I'm not educated or intelligent enough to really understand the implications of such a policy, but I can agree that the just and humane treatment of all creatures with the agency you're talking about is among the best guiding principles that I can think of.

The two issues raised above (whether it is moral to use a machine for automation, and the fair treatment of creatures with agency) is separate from the point related to the development of human-manufactured creatures with agency. We don't know how to do it yet, but we are slowly working towards it. Assuming that we eventually do figure it out, that will be a victory as long as we treat our new children like we would treat our homo sapiens children. The research and development of such creatures with agency and those for industrial automation are not mutually exclusive, and serve different purposes.

To try to put it a different way: something is going to need to harvest fruit. It's a shit job. I would rather have Spot do it than a person of any variety, human or otherwise.

I mean, absolutely, that would morally and, hopefully, legally wrong. Moreover, there are many ways to evaluate "intelligence", and it's not even clear that such criteria are the correct ways to judge whether a creature is a moral patient, a moral actor, or neither (for lack of better terms).

All that said, I think it's fairly clear that Spot is just a dumb machine. Some of its descendants might be more, but we haven't gotten close to the "robot slave" point.

> There are lots of things we can't know, but it's like toothpaste; if we posit certain things as fixed, if our observations mean anything, something else has to vary.

...how is that like toothpaste?

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but... toothpaste?

He was the first to prove that a finite bound exists. This is a huge, huge deal, since taking the answer from immensely large but finite to 2 is much easier than establishing a finite bound in the first place (as evidenced by the rapid decline in the bound from 70 million to somewhere around 250 in the last year). So, I wouldn't call it "just" getting us closer. It'll probably be proved some time in the next decade or so, and the conjecture was first made in the mid 1800s.

> Without going into detail, if you look underneath thin, shiny, white veneers of people with exploitative, corrupt histories, you'll find worse in their present day actions.

I would be more likely to believe you if you did go into detail. What exactly has Gates done in the past year or so that you object to? Or two years, or any reasonable definition of "present day"?

> The biggest difference with bitcoins is that nobody can create them out of thin air due to whim like they can with USD.

I've never really understood the objection that people have with regards to the Fed printing USD (for instance). It's actually a pretty powerful regulatory tool, isn't it? A small amount of inflation is fine (I think the Fed targets about 2%), but high inflation or deflation is a problem for people who have savings in USD. One way to manage inflation is to control the amount of dollars in circulation, which can be controlled by printing or not printing new dollars (and removing old ones from circulation). There are other ways, but the Fed is fairly limited in terms of techniques it can apply. Can someone explain why bitcoin advocates so often object to that control?

Any suggestions? I'm also looking for some resources on those topics.

Good point! For me, I think the question here isn't so much "performance gains" as "interoperability, near-ubiquity, and staying power".

For "interoperability", I'm just going to quote myself:

"If you write your library in Perl, guess what, only people writing Perl will use it. If you write it in Java, well, maybe the Scala folk will wrap it up, or the Jython folk, but you won't get any people writing in Ruby to use it. If you write it in C++, you can provide efficient bindings to any of those languages."

In terms of ubiquity, what I mean is that almost every platform has a standards-compliant-ish C++ compiler for it. And before people get in a tizzy, I mean weird platforms, not just computers with a browser installed. That's Intel, yes, but also DSPs, FPGAs, ARMs, and whole host of other chips. This didn't used to be true, but with LLVM, almost an entire standards-compliant C++ toolchain can be generated for your platform pretty easily. The exception tends to be, ironically enough, exceptions. They need to be special-cased for your chip, but still, C++ exists in places where the JVM doesn't dare go.

And finally, for staying power, I'll quote myself again!

"Look at FFmpeg or ImageMagick. They are libraries that just _won't die_, no matter how hard people have tried. My god, ImageMagick was written in 1987, and it now has Haskell bindings[0]! The only way to get that sort of longevity (and old code is good code, after all [1]) is to write in language that will outlast the ups and downs of the language or framework du jour, and C and C++ have proven to have that staying power."

[0] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/imagemagick [1] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html