csours

2. I believe that AI researchers will require some level of embodiment to demonstrate:

a. ability to understand the physical world.

b. make changes to the physical world.

c. predict the outcome to changes in the physical world.

d. learn from the success or failure of those predictions and update their internal model of the external world.

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I cannot quickly find proposed tests in this discussion.

2. Social media cares about engagement, not right and wrong. If content of a type is sought for, content of that type will be made.

3. Social media has trained people to simply react to the perceived message - "Oh, give me a break with all the whining about cancel culture!"

4. Concern trolling is very real. Social media is a low trust environment. You have no reason to think of me as a serious person, or take the time to engage with my reasoning.

5. Shame is incredibly motivating, but the shamer does not get to choose the direction that shame moves the target. You can certainly say that they are reacting wrongly, but you are not their parent/priest/custodian.

6. Once enough people are made to feel shame, they may band together. You are free to say that this is morally wrong or detestable.

7. This is all very very unsatisfying, so people usually take a more satisfying offramp and just blame someone. Blame and responsibility are very very slippery topics. Blame is about moral satisfaction and dropping a heavy, prickly, stinky and noxious emotional burden.

Blame typically falls on the person with the least social capital (relative to the blamer) who is closest to the problem.

Blame is the easiest thing to reach for in a low trust environment.

Responsibility requires a high trust environment. Responsibility can be forward and backward - who WAS responsible for this incident, who WILL BE responsible for improving the situation. In a low trust environment, responsibility will randomly transmute into blame.

8. It's easier to fight than it is to work. If someone is morally wrong, you do not owe them any emotional labor.

9. A fight does not require real harm as a trigger; a perceived social slight or lack of respect is more than enough to start a fight. Pain can be endured, shame cannot.

10. Anger and fighting form a feedback loop. Does the anger or fight come first?

11. This sort of thing has historically gotten VERY VERY bad before it gets better, even when people see it coming. It is very unsatisfying to say, but life can just really suck for a lot of people for a while. This is a heavy, noxious emotional burden, so by all means preserve your emotional health and find someone to blame.

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So what is the solution?

I don't have a satisfying solution, but I have noticed something.

I have noticed that gravity is the weakest force/interaction in the universe per scale unit.

I have noticed that gravity is responsible for the largest objects and systems in the universe.

I have noticed that people mostly do not change their views in the middle of a fight.

"That's odd" is the most power phrase in science. The greatness of humanity has followed curiosity, patience, empathy and humility.

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I won't tell anyone to stop fighting, but I will say that I strongly believe that fighting is only ever part of a solution.

I believe that fighting cannot ever fix anything or make anything better on the large scale.

Fighting can only make things less worse, for some people, in some place, at some time.

This one is VERY morally and emotionally weighty, and I think you have to do quite a bit of work to ACTUALLY understand what is going on here, but I agree.

In the middle of a fight, no one wants to look reasonable. In a fight, reasonable looks weak. In a fight, no one wants democracy, we just want to win.

Unfortunately that fight mindset also shuts down the whole thinking part of the the brain; which is how you get people who gleefully vote for a king, because they feel like the king is their champion in the fight.

For instance, there is a very satisfying story about the origin of a certain pandemic. I can think about how I would gather evidence about origins of an infectious disease, but I can't actually gather that evidence because that would require a time machine.

So, instead of any significant evidence we have a satisfying story. In the past we've called this kind of story a Conspiracy Theory; I would prefer a name like Low Information High Satisfaction Theory.

Hmm. So why can they have a 3x markup?

What is the moat? Who will overpay by $1,000?

1. People who are required to use a product with very specific certifications.

2. People who want to use a product with a desirable backstory.

In the first instance the US military requires testing and certifications that are costly to achieve, creating a moat for military suppliers.

In the second instance, some podcast listeners are willing to significantly overpay for generic supplements due to the backstory and their trust in that podcaster.

I am curious what the market breakdown is for this device - how many do they sell for case 1? how many do they sell for case 2?

Also, if they don't sell very many, then their manufacturing capital costs, design and supply chain overheads per phone will be very high.

> and an offer of a peace of mind for activists and journalists

Sounds like a trap.

Fire retardant is an emergency measure, one that would rightly be expected to see exceptionally low usage overall. But over time, more people and property have gotten closer to the forest; forest fires affect more people for many reasons.

So fire retardant use is not so rare.

The Therac-20 was a fine piece of electro-mechanical-nuclear technology, but the Therac-25 moved the control scheme out of its original context, and took away some of the physical interlocks. The Therac-25 is not remembered fondly.

Context changes over time, and assumptions need to be re-examined.

Alvarez proposed muon tomography in 1965 to search the Egyptian pyramids for unknown chambers. Using naturally occurring cosmic rays, his plan was to place spark chambers, standard equipment in the high-energy particle physics of this time, beneath the Pyramid of Khafre in a known chamber. By measuring the counting rate of the cosmic rays in different directions the detector would reveal the existence of any void in the overlaying rock structure.[48]

I'm sure. The customers they do not have are like Pebble users, and they don't want customers like Pebble users. They want customers like Apple Watch users.

It is a bit 'masque of the red death' to defend anti-competitive practices, is all I'm saying.

IV fluids aren't difficult to produce, but it IS difficult to produce PACKAGED IV fluids consistently, every time, in such a way that they don't make people sick.

Because that is difficult and important, there are tests and certifications. In turn the tests and certifications are difficult - and yes at this point there is extra cost, and that extra cost becomes a moat, which drives up price.

Unfortunately, the moat is both consumer protection and rent seeking business advantage. That is, part of the excess cost beyond the base ingredients goes to protecting consumers, however a lot of the excess cost comes from the fact that not everyone is willing to undergo all of the paperwork and process that consumers and insurance have asked the government to require.

You are not completely wrong, just mostly wrong.

"Pure government regulation" is so rare as to be non-existent in most people's daily life. "Government regulation" is someone's moat. Sometimes it's a consumer group, sometimes it's special interest, sometimes it's a business. Very rarely it is for the government's own sake.

My suggestion would be to make things as repeatable and consistent as possible. This would mean forcing some airports to change their practices to be consistent with everyone else, and forcing physical layout changes and construction. Unfortunately an app can't do that =( ... and the benefits are on the other side of a paradigm shift, so it's hard to make it happen naturally.

>> more dense

Large, high passenger capacity airliners have gone out of style but that would have been the best way to get passenger density up.

We've accelerated past our capabilities and need to slow down. ATC has incentive to slot takeoffs and landings as close as possible, but that is in tension with the goal of safety.

> Air traffic control from first principles looks significantly more automated.

We have a system 'designed' by history, not by intention. The ATC environment is implemented in the physical world, everyone has to work around physical limitations

Automation works best in controlled environments with limited scope. The more workaround you have to add, the noisier things get, and that's why we use humans to filter the noise by picking important things to say. Humans can physically experience changes in the environment, and our filters are built from our experiences in the physical world.

Anyway, sorry that isn't a question.

It's entirely possible that it's cheaper than a lawsuit and potential further reputational harm.

Perverse incentive alert: If you want to fire an exec cheaply, just do an internal honey pot.

Agreed. I do not mean that these facets are completely separable, but that they can be evaluated as their own "thing"/schema/clade/subgens. After all, even though a von Neumann computer needs both memory and computation to function, you can benchmark them separately.

I really wish I had better ontology words. Ontolographs.

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Also, I'm doing the book a great disservice by simplifying it so much.

In the SciFi book "Children of Memory", Tchaikovsky at least splits intelligence into reasoning and recall. People also talk about system size and working set.

Persistence is another thing I've come to view differently. The mind is willing to entertain a problem as long as progress feels possible. I wonder if that feeling of possible progress is trainable. Another view of 'possible progress' is rational faith (lower case f, sorry I don't have a less loaded term, after all, many consider faith to be irrational).

But mainly, I think we are still in the dark ages of psychology, brain function, and theory of the mind. Thus it is important to me to be humble about how I talk about what intelligence might mean.

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By the way, I love the Children of Time series, but I had to really defocus my mind and suspend my disbelief and scientific critique to try to imagine other intelligences.

I think the word "genius" best describes a body of work, or an accomplishment that changes the world in a surprising way, that is, genius is not just intelligence, it is being in the right place at the right time, with the right people around you (Einstein's wife was reportedly brilliant as well), and then being driven to understand and describe the world back to people through new science or art. It means that a person has enough resources and few distractions that occupy their minds.

In other words, 'genius' to me describes a situation, not just the person.

I think the point I was trying to make was about public discussions across moral lines. Another example: it's certainly possible for a pro-choice person to be uncomfortable with trying to define when personhood begins, and even discuss that with other like minded people, but that kind of thing is not what we fight about.

Public fights are incredibly dumb in the sense that they must simplify the arguments. They must do violence to the real and complex issues that human lives are made of. And thus you have several (7?) states that both elected mostly anti-abortion politicians, and also enshrined some level of access to female health care... because they saw that overly restrictive laws caused real harm to real people.

I strongly think that faith without humility is an abomination, just as loyalty without reason is an abomination, likewise progress without compassion. It's just that it so very difficult to be loyal to one's own side and rational about the other side at the same time when the fighting heats up. As it gets hotter, the extremes get louder, and the middle looks disloyal.

Again to be clear, I don't think the truth or the right way is in the middle. I don't consider myself a centrist. I do think that humans seek satisfaction, and it is hardest to shift a morally satisfying conclusion, especially when there is not a more satisfying conclusion in view.

In other words "So what? People have complex histories, what does that change? They should just stop being wrong. Where are you trying to take me?"

I'm sorry, but you just can't get there from here.

There is no scientifically imaginable form of life that could evolve or survive in or on stars. (So to be clear, this is all a flight of fancy)

Anthropic bias suggests that liquid water and carbon are essential to life.

BUT! I do think it's fun to imagine what assumptions a solarian biologist would make about the world. What would Solarian Bias look like?

What might be easier for a solarian physicist to understand? Would they have a different view of gravity?

They would start with a better understanding of astronomy than us, assuming they could make observations of the 'sky'; As the band Mogwai says "The Sun Smells Too Loud". All manner of EM observations would be more obscure (or rather their instruments would be dazzled). They would have to find some kind of Spot on the Sun where it's dark enough to see out. Maybe they could learn to ride the flares!

They would definitely start with a better version of the atom - there's no way to ignore fusion and fission if you live on the sun!

Or! What if it were possible to make observations of gravity from the surface of a neutron star. We have math and observations from here that make sense to us, but perhaps there's something that would just 'click' if you lived next to one.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my TEDx talk.

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

Consensus mechanism for pulsation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappa%E2%80%93mechanism

Basically the changes in ionization state, opacity, and temperature all influence each other, causing a cycle.

I wonder in the future how people will explain the "woke" panic, because even right now, it's a bit hard to explain.

My best effort is: Conservatives do not want Progressives to impose 'secular progressive' moral positions upon them. Of course no one really says it that way because most people have picked a 'side'.

The beauty of the human mind is that we can tell more than one story. I strongly sympathize with progressive morality, but honestly the communication is very poor.

So here's how I would describe the situation to a Progressive: "Whenever you come over to my house, you let a porcupine loose in my living room. Then you say it's my porcupine, but it's not mine! I can't take care of it!".

When we use our strongest and most motivating moral arguments, it is very motivating, but we don't get to choose which direction it motivates people towards. Our moral arguments appeal to us, but you have to already understand and identify with them for them to be 'properly' motivating.

Here's how I would describe the situation to a Conservative: "No one can tell you that you were raised wrong. Once someone is 'grown folks', you can't raise them again. But, sometimes you might notice that some things are nicer for some folks nowadays, and that trend should probably continue, even if it does make it harder to understand some people."

But sometimes, some people learn what they can 'get away' with, and they become difficult to work with (as a coworker) and difficult to manage.

Do you love the idea of someone just under the legal limit assembling your plane or automobile? Or someone who just doesn't care?

Of course sometimes "doesn't care" is just a reflection of poor management, and thus we have unions.

I don't think it's a problem that can be resolved for all time in one direction or the other, it's a tension in the system.

But! My larger point is that it's hard for a pro union person to even say "It's a tension in the system". What you are supposed to say is "Solidarity Forever" and "screw the bosses" or words to that effect.

Heresy is a sin against the moral convictions of the in-group.

> They're making a public gesture of submissiveness.

Submissiveness, as seen from the outside. Loyalty, as seen from the inside. The head of the group is the standard bearer of the group, not just the person in charge.

The concept of loyalty signaling makes a lot of nonsense more understandable to me.

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On the whole, I think labor unions are net positive benefit - so it's hard to point out any problems with them. It feels disloyal.

But one problem is that union representatives have to fight on behalf of the worst dues-paying members. If you don't fight for them, you get voted out next election. You can't have a disloyal rep!

You signal loyalty by pushing boundaries, especially when it's time to fight.

I'm loyal to you, I'm fighting for you - so you should be loyal to me.

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I'm living through my 3rd personal heresy. The first was against the church I was raised in, but more importantly against the church my family still attends.

It's the 2nd heresy that's notable to this discussion - Heresy against the rational skeptics. Debunking was never enough. Being right was never enough. There is no such thing as irrational thought - all thoughts are reasonable inside a person's head.

There might be such a thing as rational communication - the ability to build a common picture in a group of people.

    You're wrong - we are both communicating in the same (or proximate) framework or context, but you have incorrect observations or conclusions.

    I don't understand what you mean - you need to do more work if you want me to understand.

    You're being irrational - we have a severe context mismatch and you need to take my context.

    It is disloyal to even try to understand the context mismatch. People not in our context are dangerous enemies.