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.
> “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].
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.