There's a factor not considered here: to what extent were Scalia & Ginsberg able to get along because of other material conditions?
As supreme court justices we can assume that they had a basic foundation of psychological and material security - a position of prestige, a job for life, healthcare and so on.
I believe it is a lot easier to summon the "higher thoughts" necessary to be civil when ones personal position is more secure, so to achieve a more civil society it may help to work to make more insecure people secure.
Yes - I think you're right that the actual interesting result from NFLT is not that 'optimisation is impossible', but that 'uniform priors are stupid'.
Hah, interesting - this is a reference I hadn't seen and I like the sound of it. There was me thinking I'd had an idea of my own one time!
The reference machine thing would be the next problem to argue if using 2^-K as the weight; whilst you can make the K-complexity of any particular string low by putting an instruction in your machine that is 'output the string', this is clearly cheating! So there ought to be a connection between the reference machine and some real physics, since we are perhaps not interested in building optimisers that perform well in universes whose physics is very different to ours.
Sadly even if this were cracked I think the fact that K is uncomputable would make the result likely to be useless in practise.
I think you're right to bring up the NFLT, but I don't think it is applicable, it just points at the real question.
The key assumption to get the NFLT is that each environment vote has the same weight, i.e. we are targeting a uniform distribution on objective functions / environments / problems / whatever you call it.
If you break this assumption, you get an opposite result which is that search algorithms divide into some equivalence classes determined by the sets of different outcomes (traces, if I remember the theorem's description) that you discriminate between.
A uniform distribution like this is actually a very very strong precondition; it implies (looking at results about the complexity of sets of strings, since choosing an environment is like choosing a string from 2^N given some encoding, etc) that you care equally about a very large number of environments most of which have no compressible structure or equivalently have a huge kolmogorov complexity. Most of these environments would not have a compact encoding, relative to a particular choice of machine, but we are weighing these the same as those environments which are actually implementable using less than a ridiculous amount of storage to represent the function.
The reason why I think this is too strong an assumption to use is then that we don't care about all these quadrillion problems which have no compact encoding - we know this because we literally can't encounter them as they would be too large to ever write down using ordinary matter.
Allowing for this, talking usefully about evaluating an AGI or equivalently a search strategy or optimization algorithm implies having an understanding of the distribution of environments / problems we care about. I think capturing this concept in a 'neat' way would be a significant contribution; I had a go during my PhD but failed to get anywhere. Unfortunately things like K-complexity are uncomputable, so reasoning about distributions in those terms is a dead-end.
I guess if you have a limited budget to spend, I would put political action at the top of the list. However, I think typically people have several limited budgets which are kind of incommensurable.
For example for me, the decision never to fly again has not cost me any action points to spend on my involvement in political campaigns, nor has that limited my decision to work in this field for a reduced wage than I could get in adtech, or whatever.
Where efforts are not orthogonal like this I'd say go for politics first though. So we are in agreement!
I agree with most of what you have said - we need to exert political pressure by taking action. This action probably needs to be disruptive and unpleasant to work, like the actions taken by the civil rights movements of the last century.
However, I would also like to put forward the following argument for why your own efforts could make a difference:
Imagine a trolley, speeding toward a junction. On one branch is a child, tied to the rails.
You are in the plant room and can cut power to the trolley, but this will only slow it down - the trolley's momentum alone will kill the child. However, you see across the way a stranger in the signal box, surrounded by levers controlling the points in the station. They are frantically pulling levers, but so far they haven't hit on the one which diverts the trolley.
Should you cut the power to slow the trolley?
We are on the tracks - if we survive, it will be because of a political or technical breakthrough before it's too late. We don't know precisely when too late is - it could be ten years, or twenty, or ten years ago and we're buggered.
Each individual's emissions savings make too late a little later, which changes the odds of survival a little bit (or our estimate of the odds - this is probably the philosophical weak spot in the argument).
Maybe the plane trip you don't take or the car you stop driving or the product you choose not to buy is the marginal decision that gives time to avert disaster. If we do avert disaster, one of these decisions must be that marginal decision, somewhere, somewhen.
These choices are tickets in the not-extinction lottery, and it makes sense to play when you can, as much as you can.
A COP of 5 is quite optimistic for a domestic scale heat pump, at least in the climate where I work (UK). Sensible values here would be more like 2 - 3.5 depending on the temperature gradient required.
This is a function of how big the radiators are and how cold the heat reservoir is, so if you plug an air->water device into some normal radiators its performance won't be good on a really cold day, whereas if you plug a ground->water or water->water device into underfloor heating it'll probably be pretty good.
The big question (in the UK) for per-dwelling heat pumps is whether the distribution network has enough capacity to meet the winter peak load - if everyone gets a heat pump the cost might have to include replacing a lot of substations and distribution wires.
I am interested in the question of whether you could have PV cells on your roof with a coolant loop that goes into a heat pump, and a thermal store in the house for buffering. Then when it's sunny you can dump some electrical heat into your thermal store whilst also use your heat pump to chill the PV cells, keeping them at high efficiency. When it's not sunny you can draw off your thermal store giving a high efficiency for the pump.
If the numbers came out right you might be able to be self-sufficient for heat using something like this, just by making good use of the radiation already falling on the house.
In dense enough areas you can also do well with heat distribution networks, or mixed heat and cold networks. These are a good low-regret choice because you have a big central plant which you can easily refit if the best supply technology changes.
Also if you're running a heat pump having one big central heat pump with a big thermal store can allow you to get better conversion ratio from electricity to heat.
As a thought experiment that might point you toward why some people say not: if you make an atom-perfect simulation of two 1kg spheres orbiting each other in an empty universe, would that produce any gravitation?
It is being a luddite - in a good way! Don't knock the luddites, they had analogous concerns.
They didn't hate machines or novelty per se, they hated the specifics of how the machines were affecting their quality of life.
Same with facebook - networked communications might be OK (remains to be seen if you ask me), but the socio-technical-political blob that is facebook's implementation of same has side effects that lots of us find horrible.