I just meant that you seemingly said nothing.
136 karma · joined May 8, 2023
boss: i work for myself
goal: continuation?
vk.com/vzlomshumeona
That is just because "useful level of knowledge" is required to participate in society as I want to - most low-hanging fruit has already been collected. If you're at the frontier, you're immediately productive.
> In other words:
Sorry, I phrased a little incorrectly. It's more like Filter(Mutate(AmbientCulture)), that is, I selectively copy or mutate everything I see into stuff that gets accepted by the audit, after which it is my knowledge. (Mutate creates some modifications of memes as I am able, and Filter removes unsuitable ones; but computationally it is probably a one-stage directed process.) I would call it knowledge state, not "identity state", my identity is immutable too. Yes, preferences are immutable; preferences = identity.
> You argue that if ...
If I understand you well, your criticism is that I use momentary artifacts created in dependency on a given environment to establish identity independent of environment.
> the following will not remain true ("create functionally similar designs") due to changes/updates in the common good
Culture changes continuously. A given distributed identity would create a needed design over time, at each moment relying only on the current state of its own work. (It follows that identities can be nested: an identity may create a meme that will be owned by any identities that contain that identity.) If the work is not synchronized across space, work may fork and diverge, but the differences would not be functionally significant in the end.
If something suppresses your work, you should defend against this, or you will be screwed too.
There are no universal properties?
A non-trivial universal property for a domain asserts something non-trivial about everything in the domain. You think 'political' is a trivial property?
Hacker News seems to me a news aggregator, just with a certain limited scope.
Those may be too complex to invent from scratch in a few decades.
Long intellectual collaborations are a common good. You don't need to consider them estranged from their users, though. By virtue of emotional audit, knowledge I accept is assimilated by me, becomes mine. It was made by my allies, essentially by past instances of myself - nothing external here. (More like allies if it is precursor that I had to non-trivially modify for my needs, and more like self if it is a product that I accepted verbatim.) This situation doesn't contradict my sense of individualism. (In my view, personal identity is defined by preferences. So if we have same preferences, we are one. And it seems obvious that people with similar preferences will create functionally similar designs.)
So even if a child would in principle want calculus but wouldn't create it in a lifetime, they would take the steps they can in the direction that they're interested in. The distance would be dependent on capability, but more than "just a few ideas", as you say, wouldn't be improbable. Then the child may try and appoint those that the child seems worthy of receiving child's work, or child may publish it for everyone. That someone may deceive the child about self is an unsolvable flaw here. This may change in future when people solve old age mortality.
> Say there are no teachers/industry, except just all the textbooks.
To use books, one needs the ability to read. Without somebody to teach one to read, there is a small chance of success if a book that teaches written language and supposes no knowledge of written language (in usual meaning) is created. It would rely on a way to read the book and learn that would be figured out by the person, and this would work only if the person were very curious. Extent to which written language would be learned would depend on how well the interaction with the book works and how smart the person is; probability of the whole thing working seems very low, but depends on those too. Speechless video game tutorial theory would be mainly applicable here, only the medium here is also much more limited.
When you can read, I believe that text is sufficient to transfer knowledge. Quality subject books together with some books about effective learning may be sufficient, however, even if one finds a big library with all the knowledge early in life, they may simply not know what they want in terms of the index of the library, a guide book in front of everything may solve that. I don't know if a lifetime is enough to actually build a flying machine given only raw materials.
Probably not mainly, but isn't this one of its functions?
However, the dependency ends here. If you just want, you can analyze, deconstruct, modify or synthesize any memes at any level beyond the level of your primitives (given enough time).
About the definition of boundary of mind, I agree that it should be arbitrary and minds are compositional in space.
Also, how to protect a chip from reverse engineering even from all except "top actors"? I remember the price for reverse engineering of certain ICs was between 5 and 7 figures of USD. Don't know about modern IC processes, but it may be affordable for many even for those?
I don't see it, sufficiency doesn't entail necessity.
> It's important to remember that the concepts of "Expert systems" and "heuristics" did not work on their own back in the day
Expert systems are about automation of decision. I talk not about automation, but just a minimal, basic dependency on culture as opposed to complete dependency and no hope of novel thinking outside of it.
> Progress typically requires a societal-level effort in any field.
I want to know how this requirement would be quantified. Which society do you need for a given amount of progress?
> "individualism" is incompatible with reality
Why can't one, in principle, recreate some design on their own that they lack, of less complexity than rocket science or AGI?
But outside of security concerns, if you have developed in a culture that contains the concepts of abstraction, general encoding and a basic set of abstract thinking primitives, have enough of abstract thinking skill and an inclination to think autonomously, you can rebuild any concept that you should care about practically. I posit that only the more "basic", primitive ideas are vital for effective thinking. If you lack them, you are screwed, but if you just lack higher-level ones, you can work around that easily if you care. And I think that the abstract thinking skills needed to build ideas are in large part not acquired directly from culture; they consist of some elementary abstract thinking ideas together with higher-level methods and other private mental tools which are rarely shown to you and which you typically develop on your own.
I can see that one can be (un)privileged to develop in rich/poor enough culture. But one can audit their understanding of a culture - at least always in a most basic way, and again by a degree dependent on the amount of "hints" from cultural environment and personal capability.
"The idea of audit" consists of 3 concepts available virtually to all, so if it isn't available, which it almost always is, it can be rebuilt if you care enough.
Culture feeds you, but it can control you only by omission of essential general ideas of various levels. There aren't many of them, and they are self-evident, useful strictly for the user and can be used to rebuild any ideas missing from your environment that are needed to conduct a lot of stuff.
> Are you seeing how many ideas you are borrowing from society in a single sentence?
At least, when I borrow stuff, I analyse it, sometimes modify and then subscribe under the result. If I am sure that it is good for me, it can become mine.
I have emotionally audited all of my thoughts.
> Your "value-addition" is re-arrangement.
On which level, though? You probably know how big is the myriad of electronic circuits that can be made from simple elements such as wires, resistors, capacitors, inductors, transistors and diodes and seldom other. And more complex circuits are made from simpler ones with ease (I don't mean effort, I mean viability of a decent result) using composition and interfacing, given decent skill. About "rearrangement", same applies, skill here being abstract thinking - although thinking is far more complicated than circuit design, I believe thought is compositional. Of course, there is no way around the dictionary of basic primitives, but it is available almost everywhere where there is relevance.
Creation of data is "rearrangement" of a tiny set of digits.
> the way you've arranged the ideas is full of holes (and eventually not enough to 'pass the test of reality')
Either substantiate or don't write this. This is not helpful without an explanation.
I would be interested to hear you address my point about construction of ideas.
Many patent owners would be glad to find a new licensee at a fair price. Since you intend to commercialize your project, you will be able to pay reasonable license fees as you make sales.
To even begin to decide whether this claim is scientific (testable), thoughts and their content need to be defined physically here.
And why care about pre-given thoughts? I care about my emotions more. Thinking is just an utility guided by them. "What you think is good" is certainly more about emotion than ideas. One can walk back from their emotion, starting from a clean sheet, gradually reconstructing the desired idea by bit - most languages have the necessary primitives available.
> The idea of purely independent thought is an illusion.
There's no need for one's thinking to be dependent on anything more or less than reality relevant to one. No culture other than one's private own needs to be included as dependency. No need to copy or almost copy another culture as well.
> It follows that independent action is also an illusion (your idea of what to do next, as well, tends to be borrowed!)
My idea of what to do next comes from my rationality. Rationality can be rebuilt independently, at least in part that covers a big part of everyday life, when a minimal amount of education consisting of self-evident truths is given. So my behavior is only dependent on me having acquired a number of ideas useful to me individually that I have also sanitized.
> 1. All thought is fantasy
"All even integers are divisible by 2." What are you trying to imply? Fantasy can be made to conform to rules and to be useful directly as functional data.
> 3. Most thought is borrowed
"Most" by what metric?
> 5. Society is the manager of thought, not the individual
I think that an individual can become the "manager" of their own thinking as well by degree such as allowed by their cultural environment plus that of their capability.
> 6. Thought advances as a whole
What?
> 7. Without collective thought as a substrate, the individual won't function
Please explain in more detail why and what is 'collective thought'.
Anyone can save the current content of any http:/https: URL in Wayback Machine, so the question is simply whether IA will be around for the time that you care about.
> It may not make economic sense for the websites to stay up
So, no more WWW?