rad88 · HackerTrans

3 years agodiscuss

That hardly strikes me as more obvious, to say the least.

But then again perhaps no thing has ever struck me at all.

3 years agodiscuss

I'm saying that it's unscientific nonsense. Bolstrom has predicted that the number of people potentially in the future is between approximately 0 and 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This isn't an estimate that can or should factor into any decision at all. 100B people are going to live in the 21st century. Worry about them.

rad88

3 years agodiscuss

Actual people are vastly outnumbered by entropy fluctuations in the long run, according to any number of valid cosmological models. Their total population is greater than 10^35 by far, and does not depend on whether superintelligence is possible or likely to destroy the actual human race. That question makes no difference to almost every human who will ever have a thought or feeling.

You could say, well, that's just a theory -- and it is a dubious one, indeed. But it's far more established by statistics and physical law than the numbers Bolstrom throws out.

rad88

3 years agodiscuss

It doesn't seem that crazy. Working from a simpler analogy first -- if an alien can read 95% of written English, but completely mischaracterizes the remaining 5%, would a reasonable scientist conclude that they can't read at all and are just guessing randomly? No, and it would indeed be unreasonable to conclude that there's no way to write differently so that the alien performs substantially better.

We know some more about LLMs than we do aliens. The LLM is a neural network whose parameters have been optimized to reduce the total size of its errors, as measured against an enormous set of empirical data.

We have to add to your analogy then, that it's somehow known the alien speaks English on their own planet remarkably well. They are still not perfectly correct, but when they have to describe something on that planet, in English, they can do it better than they generally can given the same task on Earth.

It would again be totally unscientific to conclude that because of this, there is no way the alien can talk about earthly objects or ideas. The impulse of the mere engineer, to just hack around and find out, is a scientific one.

rad88

3 years agodiscuss

Blowing up buildings, murdering jews, plotting assassinations etc. is substantially damaging. It is "extremist".

rad88

3 years agodiscuss

Why is it amazing that it left the pad?

rad88

3 years agodiscuss

Natural phenomena do tend to make sense when investigated scientifically. It seems rather that not all cosmologists and mathematicians have an obligation to develop scientific theories:

  - Blackhole Cosmology, Eternal Inflation: unscientific, dismiss reality
  - Mathematical Universe: unscientific, no reality

The actual sciences brought to bear on cosmology (thermo and statistical mechanics) can make enough sense of our observations, without the psychedelics, but do nothing for cosmology as the search for meaning which is what it really is.

Most of these concepts, in all their variety, share the same metaphysical premise that our observed universe was inevitable. To the extent that it appears very distinct, we simply cannot see the overall structure in which it was actually a certainty.

The Boltzmann Brain at least gets closer to facing the issue objectively. The basic reality that we experience today -- in which there's some amount of matter and charge, spacetime, in which eggs only scramble, etc. -- just happens to be so. From our point of view, something highly "improbable" happened in the distant past.

rad88

4 years agodiscuss

The really implausible thing about reversing a broken egg is not that it works itself back into the "original" state, but that it takes the same energy back from the environment (thrown off as heat in the forward direction) and converts it perfectly into the needed work. Which goes against physical law and also is something it's hard to even visualize. The environment shoves heat at the thing in some very specific way and then it jumps back into nothing more or less than a whole egg. Hopefully it won't start oscillating.

This can be expressed in the language of entropy but it is essentially a thermodynamic principle. Carlo Rovelli expressed it in a way that I like:

> In order to leave a trace, it is necessary for something to become arrested, to stop moving, and this can only happen in an irreversible process -- that is to say, by degrading energy into heat. In this way, computers heat up, the brain heats up, the meteors that fall into the moon heat it; even the quill of a medieval scribe in a Benedictine abbey heats a little the page on which he writes. In a world without heat, everything would rebound elastically, leaving no trace.

rad88

4 years agodiscuss

The figure at the center of all of this, when he was banned, literally just said whatever and started a competing social media site. Concerns about this topic have picked up over the last decade; "we'll carry anything" companies have formed in response. Not that those didn't exist before.

In any case, you can get online somewhere to say what you want. Use Cloudflare. The market surrounding the matter of publishing stuff online is healthy, and the nature of the internet/web is such that you can reach a global audience with relatively minor equipment.

On the consumer side, what is the argument? There is no lack of outlets, serving every niche, freely available on the same connection that delivers you Twitter. What's the problem? That people can't look away from Twitter?

comments