simondw

That feels like an accidental, not essential, property of karaoke. I doubt anyone who enjoys karaoke would reject a track recorded by the original artist because it wasn't a cover by someone they'd never heard of.

I think a valid meaning might be "better at drawing what I want to draw." This is absolutely a skill that can be improved, even if the aesthetic quality of the output can't be evaluated objectively.

Do you have evidence to support that?

The Mandela Effect is named for that false memory, yes, but it's more general. From Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_Effect):

> Other examples include memories of the title of the Berenstain Bears children's books being spelled Berenstein,[16][17] the logo of clothing brand Fruit of the Loom featuring a cornucopia,[18] and the existence of a 1990s movie titled Shazaam starring comedian Sinbad as a genie.

Fortunately, bicycles are not responsible for 100x more injuries and deaths than cars, too. To me, that suggests that "number of moving violations per mile" may not be the most important metric.

But how does this "uncaused cause" add anything to our understanding of the cosmos, beyond adding one more entity?

Why not say that God was created by God_1, who just already existed?

Lots of things, but I'm not sure why you're asking that. Could you connect that back to the point you're making?

> they would need an explanation that you’re looking for whatever pops into their head

Of course. And the equivalent of that explanation is baked into DALL-E, in the form of its programming to always generate an image.

> but DALLE can not act like humans

No, not generally, but I don't think anyone has claimed that.

But that's kind of the point -- the orientation of the image on the retina is irrelevant, unless it's being looked at by a little man sitting right-side-up inside your head.

> Is it really the same consciousness though?

And to push it further, in what sense is each moment's consciousness the same as the previous?

The idea is appealing, I think, because it feels like a step toward what is surely the ultimate goal: flawless natural language generation from some semantic encoding. If you squint, these functions and arguments are the semantic encoding, and their implementations are doing their best to imitate the NLG for an extremely limited domain.

Of course, the problem is that implementations like this are actually stepping away from the very good NLG system we already have: human translators, who typically aren't coders. And the need for NLG hasn't gone away -- someone still has to hardcode these (parameterized) strings.

Great question. Most people would probably say no, panpsychism is unfalsifiable.

On the other hand, brains certainly do seem to function like qualia detectors (as evidenced by everyone talking about qualia). So, who knows, maybe there's something further to be explored there; maybe it's related to the combination problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism#Combination_proble...).

Panpsychism doesn't claim that everything has complex sensory perception, higher reasoning, memory, etc. The hard problem isn't about any of those things, which indeed have clear neuronal correlates and can easily be turned off.

The idea is that there's always "something that it's like to be X", where X can equally be a conscious human, an anesthetized human, a dead human, or an electron.

Well, to me part of your point seemed to be that a lot of what we call racism has roots in classism, rather than in beliefs about inherent differences between races.

My point is that the resulting behaviors and discrimination can still be racist, even if they don't have their ultimate roots in racism itself.

From your link:

> also : behavior or attitudes that reflect and foster this belief : racial discrimination or prejudice

> : the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another

Edit: Anyway, I do recognize that the distinction you're pointing out does have implications for the best way to address the problems.

> people of race A will get treated as if

I think you've just described racism.

You're still conflating "pregnancy" with "pregnancy that you're forced to carry to term." The former is necessarily a potential consequence of having sex; the latter is not.

I'm still curious what principles you think justify the enforcement of the latter, and especially why they don't cover things like the OP's forced organ donation scenario.

Edit: Just to expand on the first point, I think there's some circular reasoning going on here.

If the claim is "people should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term," you can't support that with "because people should endure the consequences of their actions" if "consequences of their actions" means "being forced to carry a pregnancy to term."

Because then you're just saying "people should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term because people should be forced to carry a pregnancy to term."

> people should be able to reneg on the consequences of actions if those consequences are not desirable

I think you've gone a little too broad with that principle. If I ask a taxi to take me somewhere, I can get out if I notice the driver is drunk. If I accidentally spill a glass of water, I can clean it up. And so on.

It's a loss of bodily autonomy because, well, that's what bodily autonomy is. The government is compelling you to use (and risk) your body for a particular purpose.

That's a separate question from whether that loss of bodily autonomy is justified.

> Women choose to have sex consensually, no?

Well, yes, sometimes. Maybe you could be more explicit about how you think that justifies the loss of bodily autonomy?

For example, maybe you have a principle like "If you played a necessary role in the creation of a person, then you can be compelled to use your body to support their life." Do you think fathers should be compelled to donate blood or organs to their offspring?

We can sit here and ask different questions all day, but let's at least recognize that they're different questions.

Originally we were talking about many people forced to give up privacy in order to possibly prevent some potential future deaths.

You're talking about one person consenting to give up privacy in order to prevent multiple certain deaths.

> one clearly dominates

Even if we agreed that life begins at conception, it's not at all clear to me that the bodily autonomy and privacy issues would go away.

> it would be better if the states wrote legislation that clearly defines human life

Except there's no objective answer in reality, because "human life" is a fuzzy made-up concept. I doubt some arbitrary legislation would settle things down. People would still disagree just as vehemently.

> Perhaps I'm missing something

How is the government going to know which people have fetuses in them, and how long they've been there, without some loss of privacy? (Do you think menstrual cycles are private information, for example?)

And how does the government know what people do (or plan to do) to their own bodies without some loss of privacy?

> In regards to bodily autonomy, again if the fetus is a life

Well yes, you can argue against bodily autonomy as a compelling argument for legalizing abortion. My initial point was that you were just ignoring it.

That said...

> you have to be a good steward of the life

Says who? Compelling someone to use their body as a host (not "steward") of another life is a violation of their bodily autonomy.

If you're going to use car analogies, we also don't say that anyone involved in a car crash must donate blood or organs to save other victims.

You're conveniently leaving out one major concern of the pro-choice side: the bodily autonomy of lives that are uncontroversially people.

I also think you're dismissing privacy too quickly. How much privacy would you give up in the name of saving lives?

It also turns out masks are not made of burning cigarettes. How many more of these do we have to do?

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borscht, the English spelling comes via Yiddish "borsht".

> would you claim that eating a banana (even at population scale) meaningfully changes mortality

Probably not, but only because "That's silly, bananas are just fruit!" rather than because of any scientific study I've seen or done. So you really shouldn't listen to me.

I think the problem is that (at least for now), we don't have good mental models of AI drivers and what their failure modes might be.

Dangerous human drivers are likely to be consistently erratic (e.g., drunk), or distracted and oblivious in certain situations (bikes, intersections, lane changes).

For all we know, an AI driver might drive perfectly for three hours, and then accelerate full speed onto the sidewalk.

I'm not sure I understand. Why would someone dismiss a plan that they think is generally solid and doesn't have a large cost, just because it fails in a few edge cases (bathroom, etc.)? Seems like this is strictly about getting access to more information to increase your chances of a good outcome (even though it doesn't guarantee it).

If the idea is that 5 minutes isn't enough time to beat the traffic -- well, yeah, could be, but that also depends on where you live.

Do you perhaps mean abundance instead of paucity?

Imagine a pill that completely cures cancer, 100% of the time. But maybe one in a million pills gets stuck in someone's throat and they choke to death.

So instead of 10 million cancer deaths per year, suddenly we see zero. But also 10 extra choking deaths.

"The Anti-Cancer Pill caused 10 people to choke to death this year. In contrast, 0 people died of cancer. 10 is much bigger than 0! Why hasn't this pill been banned immediately?"

That's potentially misleading in a couple ways:

* By default, years before 2019 aren't turned on. 2016 in particular looks fairly close to 2021.

* At first glance, it looks like 2021 is plunging straight toward 0 -- but wait, the y axis starts at 1065. The whole chart only covers the range 1065-1100. This year's level is currently 98.3% of last year's!

Are things still bad? Maybe, but I would want an expert interpretation, not a confusing chart.