chronofar

More interesting than arguing a jumble of electrochemical reactions have taste? That may seem more readily familiar but is no less strange if you prod at it. Nonetheless it’s difficult to argue either don’t produce output that has qualities of discernment (ie taste).

Perhaps you answered your own question. I think our confusion sometimes stems from assuming those in charge must want to benefit that which they are charged with stewarding.

And yet people overwhelmingly prefer to work for these non-employees owned companies instead of working in cooperatives - how do you explain that?

Easily: there are far more non-employee owned companies than employee owned. Thus this isn’t a preference at all, it’s merely the availability of the market.

Now you could say that entrepreneurs who start companies have a preference for non-employee owned, thus explaining the aforementioned market allotment. Again that’s pretty easy to explain, because of course such an entrepreneur would give up ownership in an employee-owned arrangement. It’s also just the de facto paradigm most are aware of in news cycles and business schools, and is easier to setup and support.

I think the evidence is that, on the whole (since we’re broadly referring to “people” and obviously there is tremendous diversity contained within), people do not hate each other, they hate the “other” team (whatever that may be). We’re wired for in/out group think to such a high degree that it’s incredibly easy to dial in division and purpose it to some end.

Two individuals in a room are more likely to find common ground than hate until you bring up the right sport they happen to be on opposing teams for.

but regulation and liability has made it impractical to develop a modern engine.

Can you go into more detail about this? What regulation/liability specifically has stifled modern engine development? And is the answer deregulation? Or more carefully applied regulation of a different sort?

I think specifics are critically important for this kind of thing. General rhetoric is often “too much regulation” or “not enough regulation,” but what we usually want is “the correct regulation to align incentives,” which is often different for different cases.

I’m at the other end, I think the show suffered due to its insistence on querulous characters as a means to pathos, but was kept afloat by its wit and humor (much of it indeed “wacky”). That is of course very much a personal preference thing, but I couldn’t connect with much of the darker side of the show, even while I admired much of its execution.

As others have said though, it definitely gets better as the seasons roll on, along both the humor and drama fronts. The final season has many of the funniest and most poignant moments of the show.

I believe this was likely referencing your topic of confusion there to at least some degree:

Historically I think Svelte went too far into magic territory, where it's not 100% clear why things work a certain way, and that's something that we're rectifying with Svelte 5.

Svelte 5 uses a different approach to reactivity using runes: https://svelte.dev/blog/runes

Yes I noted it doesn't answer the "hard" problem explicitly in both of my replies here on this thread. Indeed, the very reason it is called the "hard" problem is b/c it very well seems perhaps unsolvable (though this is certainly debatable, but this is the very etymology of the term).

Your actual stated questions (why am I me and not someone else, etc) are in no way part of the "hard" problem's formulation, and are indeed easily answered by materialism as I noted.

Perhaps take a look at the wiki article on the hard problem: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Sure, none of what you said there would lead to the conclusion that the "experience is not something that really happens," though it's also possible there's a just a failure of communication here and I'm not understanding what you meant.

Completely sidesteps which question?

It answers very clearly these questions posed by the person I was responding to:

why I am currently occupying the body that I am as an observer, and not another one, or perhaps even none.

It definitely does not answer the "hard" problem of consciousness, which is what you're alluding to and which I specifically and explicitly said it didn't answer.

The experience is internal, the body (the limb that's missing) is external to the experience. The confabulatory experience of "I don't want to move" is an internal experience and cannot itself be an illusion, it's simply an incorrect assessment of the actual state of the body.

Materialism, which by my reading has the most evidence going for it, solves these particular questions rather easily. Your experience as an observer is the result of your brain. It's not another one or none b/c those aren't your particular brains.

This doesn't solve the "hard" problem, it's still quite mysterious how exactly and at what point neuronal mappings become sentient, but it does leave you without having to wonder the particular questions you asked there.

So, they think they are having one experience, but they are wrong about their own internal experience: in fact, they are not moving that limb because they can't.

I think it's rather the opposite, they aren't wrong about their internal experience, it's just that their internal experience doesn't match the objective reality of their body (which in this sense is external).

I think it is indeed entirely possible that our self-model can fool us about the realities of various situations, even those with our own body/emotions/etc, but I'm not sure how one could then derive the conclusion that the experience doesn't exist. It would just be instead that the experience is rather inaccurate/confabulated.

not because it "thinks" but because the way it's wired it's (nearly - barring solar radiation, I suppose, which incidentally also goes for cells) inevitable that it will react to a stimulus in a predefined way (even though the way cells react to stimuli is far more advanced than a CPU)

I think these are likely different only by way of their level of complexity. We simply substitute a word like "think" when the reactions to stimuli are far too complex and numerous for us to track fully. But ultimately said "thinking" is made up to many, many cells following those same stimulus/reaction patterns.

I don't think they're as small as you're saying. There have been multiple well documented incidents with 737 MAX that have not been with the A320. Maybe you think it's small enough to not worry about, said incidents are enough for me to want to avoid that aircraft entirely. Absolute risk is certainly still low, but I'll take the safer in comparative risk any day there.

Paying attention to planes and risks of other forms of transport are not mutually exclusive.

I played Cyberpunk 2077 after BG3, and though the production values and story are very strong it feels a bit like a walking simulator after the gameplay richness BG3 offered. The RPG elements feel more or less meaningless in comparison, as though I could make most any dialogue or leveling choice and it'd scarcely matter. As a result I feel very much like a passenger in a very long and mildly interactive movie.

It's an interesting experience, a situation where I can acutely detect the bar getting moved for what I expect a game to be. I hope recent progressions in AI will bring us more interactive stories a la BG3 in glossy and well-funded packages a la Cyberpunk 2077.

My point is it has no more depth than "I will earn money and give it to causes that make the most good", which is just "do good" with a materialistic twist.

This is just one particular angle some folks take. It's not by any means the only, or even primary, path EA advocates for. It is of course the one you'll find high earners parading around as an ostensible reason for their wealth creation given it allows self-interest to appear altruistic (which is not wholly unreasonable, those are not opposites and have some overlap, but it also is likely touted far more than exercised).

If every member of EA has different approaches and opinions, and some of its biggest proponents are scammers, what is EA really bringing to the table?

Its biggest proponents are not scammers, there are just scammers who happened to have claimed to be part of EA. The biggest proponents are probably William Macaskill, Toby Ord, and Peter Singer, none of whom I've ever heard called anything close to a scammer (given how they live their lives that'd be a hard claim to make).

What it brings to the table is framing a more methodical and deliberate way to help others. People generally gravitate towards bleeding-heart altruism when they feel called to (disaster response, someone you know, etc), and various charities and causes are wildly different in the efficiency with which they use the resources given to them. This is to say nothing of careers one might choose for a multitude of reasons. This is all well and fine, but the point is one can also approach these things using informed objectivity to maximize contributions (by giving to charities where dollars go the furthest, to causes that are neglected, etc) rather than relying on subjective compulsion (which is going to be scattershot in efficiency).

Of course EA doesn't have a patent on this, it's just a label, but its one that helped popularize a mode of giving that would've largely remained hidden without it. The problem, as I've mentioned, is group mechanics end up co-opting the label which distorts the intent it originally carried. I truly mean no offense, but it seems from your comments you're just aware of the scandals of SBF or similar, not of the tenets of the actual founders of EA or its various missions outside of the aforementioned "earn to give." Perhaps peruse their site a bit: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/

And what evidence can one really collect of how to do the most good?

This is indeed a central question to EA, one various proponents attempt to answer in various ways.

Someone claims (let's say to simplify they are not lying) to want to maximize their good in the world, for that to be accomplished they need to do something that somebody does not approve of (only caring about money, being rude to you, whatever it is).

Your assumption here appears to be that anyone subscribing to an evidence-based approach to do the most good (ie EA) must also inherently subscribe to the "ends justify the means." These aren't inextricably linked, it's quite possible to have one and not the other. One can quite rationally seek to maximize their altruistic effectiveness without sacrificing general decency in their day to day life. Morals usually have some nuance.

This is a model. If the model is wrong you might cause more harm than good.

I'm not sure what your point is. This is true of most any practical application of a moral framework. EA is more about providing a methodology than providing answers.

Well I don't think that's really an interpretation so much as it is a strategy certain people may take, and as you're alluding to a very fallible one at that. It certainly could be a reasonable strategy to amass wealth and power and wield that for altruistic reasons, such a person does indeed stand to be much more effective than most. But of course people are quite corruptible and intentions can be fuzzy, so there's no guarantees that person will follow through, or that whatever they had to do to amass that money/wealth was worth it for the ultimate good.

Again one can look at the underlying tenets of such a creed and evaluate them for their conceptual merit without blasting the entire enterprise because some people abuse them for personal gain.

I find 2 (dangerous) scenarios to be most likely, one easier to reason about than the other:

1. Access is not uniformly distributed, thus some entity uses it to create immense inequality.

2. The AI becomes sufficiently intelligent and powerful that it looks at humans the same way we look at monkeys and treats us similarly (in other words, not overly concerned with human flourishing or even survival while commanding resources humans need to survive and flourish).

Neither of these necessarily mean "destroy" humans, and neither are by any means guaranteed (though #1 seems almost a foregone conclusion) but it could very well lead to an existential threat.

It's also possible we get a combination of the 2, wherein a subsect of humans can merge with AI but it is inaccessible to all.

There are other less existential concerns as well though, such as at what point does such a system become conscious and deserve rights? I'm not confident we really have any idea how to ascertain that, and bumbling into it could be tantamount to torture.

Not really at all, if we were to try and reduce EA to a pithy one-liner it would be more like "if one aspires to do good (altruism), one should use evidenced based data to determine how they can do the most good with their limited resources (effective)."

Babies and bathwater.

The philosophical underpinnings of AI Safety and Effective Altruism absolutely have merit and warrant consideration. Of course as with most things human group/tribal tendencies can tend to overwhelm such underpinnings rather quickly, and it should be no surprise when it turns out individuals who broadcasted belonging to x or y group turned out to be less than trustworthy (or merely incorrect/misguided) along various dimensions.

We can critique the specific actions or beliefs of such actors and question broad labels worn as badges without casting dispersions on a wide swath of potential tenets that may fit into such a label as "complete BS".

As I attempted to make clear, none of what I said was judging you or your life or choices or anything of the sort, it was simply a reflection on a turn of phrase (a semantic nitpick as I said, but one I thought worth exploring because of the how often that phrase is used in I think subtly pernicious ways, again to say nothing about you specifically). But my apologies if this wasn't clear enough and it seemed I was judging your individual choices, definitely not my intention.

Of course there are trade-offs and it isn't easy (or possible) to get everything you want. My point was specifically around ensuring we feel responsible and in control of our life, not as though it's happening to us (which again is not a hypothesis about you specifically, just commentary on the language). It's a common trap, one I fall into all too easily, and language is I think an important way the trap gets lain. Perhaps you have not experienced that trap at all, again, was just focusing on the language.

But they got married we got married, jobs, moving to new houses, life happened. You focus shifts over time to work and family. It gets harder.

Life didn't "happen" here, you designed divergent paths. This is I know largely a semantic nitpick, but I think this kind of phrasing belies the most common sort of problem that keeps people from doing things like what the OP suggests. In a way it often feels like "life happens" to us, and certainly in some cases that's largely true (unforeseen health complications or accidents for instance), but marriages and jobs and houses and friends really shouldn't feel like that. And if they do, it probably bears a bit of introspection and deliberation to ensure you're not just hurtling through milestones that seem age appropriate and are instead deliberately moving towards the best life you can imagine designing.

Note none of this is commentary on your specifics, of course I know next to nothing about you. I'm only attempting to focus on the phrasing there, and how I think it is indicative of a very common trap we can fall into wherein we can tend to relinquish agency and thus without thinking slide away from the things we cherish (such as friends close enough to be a kind of soul mate).

they don't fully consider the actual ramifications of those policies.

This is the generalization that started this thread and is wrong. On the contrary I believe you're showing evidence that you're not considering the full ramifications of the policies you support.

It is odd that you are so incredibly dismissive of an argument that tries to help people and that you don't see it as a valid argument.

I think the proposal I made is far more likely to help people (protect people from OD'ing and ingesting dangerous contaminates they didn't intend to as well as offering them ample treatment options to stop when they want to). To say that prohibition helps people is naive in the extreme and neglects all the profound harm it causes (both directly and indirectly) while also robbing people of their agency.

And again the reason I'm dismissing your argument isn't even that, it's that it's completely logically inconsistent with typical western values (not just libertarian ones). If you want to argue as you are that drugs should be outlawed on the basis of their potential for addiction then you have to start looking at outlawing a great many other things that have similar potential (sugar, sex for pleasure, portion food so no one can eat too much, etc). But of course you probably don't advocate that, you just live in a world where drugs have already been made illegal so it seems reasonable and like you're helping people, but what you're doing is robbing them of their personhood.

It just seems silly to me that you acknowledge that it's not OK to ruin society completely but it's fine to ruin only some lives all because they should be able to make a short sighted decision that they will regret.

I'm frankly a bit baffled that this is difficult to follow. As an advocate of individual freedom, I think people should be free to make their own choices without some governing body deciding what is best for them and forcing them to follow specific paths. This is mostly because I don't think we can trust any governing body to truly know (or even care) what's best for individuals at this juncture, the incentives just aren't aligned, thus freedom is preferable. I would like for this not to be the case actually, I'm a strong proponent of direct democracy, but that is for another conversation.

However if society crumbles the choices available to everyone start to drop dramatically, and future opportunity is replaced by large amounts of suffering. This should obviously be avoided at all costs. There are all sorts of things one could imagine we'd need to give up if civilization truly started to collapse, but we would only look to give up that we may preserve them in the future. Indeed we have a good example of this just recently w/ COVID (though the threat to society was overstated there it seems).

I'm beginning to think maybe you haven't consumed enough dystopic warnings in books/movies :-) (both highlighting the dangers of government control and apocalyptic conditions calling for extreme measures).

I am guessing you've never had a hard drug addiction or known someone that has had it. How is it nonsense? They literally want to stop and know it is ruining their lives but can't stop. All because you want people to have some silly right to take hard drugs for some bs ideal. How about have some empathy and try to minimize misery?

How about you have some empathy and give people some credit? Your view is the un-empathetic one here, not mine, you're viewing people as helpless children who need to be saved from themselves by you or whatever leaders you vote for (who are the same helpless children with propensity for vice and avarice and such as everyone else, just with more power).

I absolutely have experienced addiction and know many others who have. By your count the ones who rehabbed did so by sheer luck or outside force through no free will of their own. By my count they overcame a very difficult trial and accomplished something meaningful by doing so (likely with some helpful support).

And again, via regulation and treatment there is an incredible potential to reduce misery and suffering, both in those addicted to drugs and to those impacted by the profound knock on effects of black markets run amok. Prohibition is I believe the cause of far, far more suffering, this is why I'm such a strong advocate for ending it. Indeed I think it is one of the largest problems in the world today.

You want to rob people of their choice. I want people to have individual choice and support available when they need help. It should be clear which I think is best for human kind in the long run (and short run).

Just because a 2 can represent different values doesn’t mean there’s not a system, it just means the system is configurable. This is a good thing, you just have to know how the tool works.

Even if I don’t know what specific values m-2 may hold for a given project, I certainly know a lot more about it right off the bat than whatever .class-name you may have come up with from scratch, and can reference the config to know the rest.

OK, so it is a coherent argument then and just one you don't agree with?

No, it would only be coherent if you also accept the other premises I put forth (which I'm fairly certain you don't, but you haven't really acknowledged or debated them so hard to say for sure, suffice to say they are not commonly help premises).

The collapse of a portion of society is ok with you, just not the collapse of all of society?

Yes I absolutely favor freedom of individual choice over preventing all individuals from making choices that may not be best for them (because, again, the individual should have primacy over determining what is best for them). Clearly. There are also very obvious solutions to this problem: regulated distribution (w/ heroin for instance where folks can be assured clean drugs that are properly portioned for their use case to reduce risk of OD) and readily available treatment (if users want to stop there are plenty of options to help them do so, we just need to reappropriate resources currently used in a failed attempt at prevention to make treatment more universally available).

where is the retention of prime control over their bodies?

This is nonsense. Addiction is indeed very powerful, but in our society we still consider these individuals responsible for their actions. Being in the throes of heroin addiction is not a valid plea to escape a murder conviction, and indeed it shouldn't be.

Addiction is simply part of the human condition. This would be true even if you completely removed scheduled drugs from all possible use. We cope with that best by treating it not attempting to ban it.

Why does the fact that hard drug addiction hijacks the reward circuitry of the brain and is bad not a coherent argument?

Well forgive the repetition here, but because that’s both an incredibly vague definition and because it’s incompatible with a society that values individual agency. Again I didn’t bring up these other examples of sex and sugar and social media to highlight a slippery slope, I brought them up to highlight how odd it would be to attempt to legislate on the mere potential of irrational behavior. Human psychology is far more complex than you’re allowing for here, and only in a more black and white world of neurology, coupled with a world where we thought it prudent for society to outlaw anything with potential to catalyze less than “optimal” (as defined by someone) behavior, would such an argument bear any weight.

Say a drug causes schizophrenia after using it half the time. Should that be legal? How about every time? What if it kills you in a year after one use?

Yes and yes. A user should be able to consume straight poison if they want to. Again individuals should retain prime control over their bodies and minds, if we are to value freedom at all I can’t think of a freedom more basic than that.

I could imagine the possibility of a drug that has just the right combination of effects to be both irresistible and destructive to such a degree that it threatens to collapse society in such a way where no solutions are obvious where I could see reconsidering as a matter of pragmatism, but we’re quite far from something like that.

How about we try to avoid the really harmful stuff that ruins lives and kills people like drug addiction?

Hard no. Alcohol ruins many people's lives, but that shouldn't interfere with my ability to imbibe if I so choose, it means that I should be educated and careful with how I do so.

This is not some slippery slope thing

My intention was not to suggest it's a slippery slope, but rather that it is logically completely inconsistent w/ the values of individual freedom. If we value individual freedom, which most in the west purport to by default, individuals should have the ability to direct their body and mind in any way they deem appropriate and endure the consequences. Only you can experience your consciousness, and you should have primacy over how its stewarded.

Your thought process is not logical when addicted and maximizes getting high at the cost of everything else.

This argument just doesn't hold any weight whatsoever. Humans are irrational in a whole host of circumstances in all sorts of ways, addiction is only one of them, and of course people can and do have all sorts of addictions to things that are wholly adaptive in others lives (sex as we've mentioned before is a fine example). The fact that addiction can drive some such irrationality is in no way a coherent argument to their prohibition.

What did I make up and what did I say that requires evidence? And what responsibility do you imagine I’d require to have the opinion I relayed?

Of course nothing is simple if given a close enough look, but there are also rather straightforward solutions here such that we shouldn’t feel just totally stumped about what to do.