larkery

This is like a strictly worse kind of s-expression. C.f.

    (tag "This text node contains" (magic "unicorns") " and " (magic "fairy dust"))

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.

Thanks for your interesting reply, I enjoyed it.

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?

There's another solution to this question (or maybe the same one in different words). I believe something similar, but I still do things - why do I do things? Why write this message?

The question seems like a show-stopper.

Then again, the trees I can see outside my window don't believe pointing their leaves at the sun matters or bears meaning, nor do the planets consider turning in their orbits. Nevertheless, they continue to do these things!

What is the difference between me, and these other systems? Why do I need to Ultimately Matter to live?

I guess part of the issue here is that cars are a kind of coordination problem - if nobody else is using a car on the roads, cars are quite a good choice. They are fast and easy, and go where you want.

However, each person who uses a car creates some external costs (a high traffic factor / unit of person-flow) which are borne by all the other road users. Once people choosing the "defect" strategy (cars) have enough numbers, the "cooperate" strategy (not cars) gets broken for other solutions that use the road network, so the system fails to a bad equilibrium if there are enough defectors in the population.

I agree with your scepticism about solving the commute traffic with a self-driving silver bullet. The research for traffic flow [1] says that, with human driven cars, a slice of a 4m wide lane will pass about 1000 people/hr in cars, about 7000 people on foot or bicycle, and about 10,000 people by bus.

That means that to get competitive flow with buses, self-driving cars need to deliver a tenfold improvement in flow. Since in traffic cars are quite tightly packed already, you probably can't get much from putting them closer together, so even if self-driving magic gives you two doublings of flow on its own you still need to more than double the speed limit to compete. I can imagine this working only on roads dedicated to self-driving vehicles, with no pedestrian crossings, so now self-driving cars benefits only materialise if they eat up a chunk of the public space.

You might get a bit of improvement from vehicle sharing as well, but it seems like a really complicated way to attack a problem that already has an OK low-tech answer, at least in high density areas.

Where I live the census says that about half the commute journeys in the area are less than a few miles, for which cars of any sort seem ridiculous to me, for the able bodied. For those who aren't able bodied or have a long journey all the able bodied car users on short trips are using up a scarce resource that they need!

Throw in the health benefits of active transport, and the health cost of particulate emissions (still a problem with electric cars, since a decent chunk comes off tyres and brakes) and it looks like a wash to me. Then again I am one of those awful bike people, so maybe I miss the point.

[1] Litman 2017, Brun & Vuchic 1995 etc.

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.

Pedantry over.

I think there's a case to be made that it is possible to judge whether people's behaviours are helping them to enjoy their lives to the best extent.

It is a very extreme position to say that there is literally nothing which can be generalised about people's experiences, and so one person's heroin main-lining hobby is as good as another's model railway collection so long as they both profess an equal belief in their respective enjoyment.

There must be something more than this that we can say, since we have the distilled thoughts of millennia of some of the most capable humans thinking about these questions (what makes a good life) and lots of case histories of how people's lives have gone.

This is different from judging someone's moral worth or probity or what have you, and I think it is harmful to gloss over the distinction because it creates a kind of skeptical collapse.

This might be what the prior comment means to indicate by getting a life - that we should each individually research this question and not presume we've got a good answer already. If it is what they meant, I agree that their phrasing was unskillful.

I don't have any timing data and I don't actually use the autosuggest thing (I wrote that for someone else who asked about it), but I can say that I have months of daily use in mine and there's no noticeable query delay or insertion delay so far.

Sqlite3 is to thank for that, it's a pretty amazing bit of engineering.

I think it would be remarkably weird if the state inside me were entirely uncoupled from 'exterior things'.

In the zen view, the 'trick' is that there are no exterior things because the distinction between the exterior and interior is artificial. Processes of change may reach across that boundary just as they cross any other boundary we care to draw, so there is no absolutely self-governed component.

Assuming (perhaps wrongly, let me know if I'm overreaching) that you see your self as a stoic or happy to interpret them, what do you think the Aurelius quote above means? What is the soul which it's talking about?

We can identify patterns that remain stable for a bit, so you might say that my soul is whatever essential features or patterns remain unchanged, but on the long span I find it hard to imagine such features. After all I will be eaten by worms or incinerated sooner or later.

In zen there is the question, who is in control of these feelings? Where is the locus of control, and what kind of a thing is it?

Where is the boundary between things inside your mind and things outside of your mind? Where does control get inserted into the process of things arising and falling away?

One way of thinking about this produces a realisation that nobody is in control, but nobody has been denied or robbed of control either. Instead, the idea of control appears to be a kind of misapplied concept.

I think this is a realistic interpretation of the evidence which does not lead to a depressive fugue, but only when it's absorbed beyond a textual description (a bit like how reading a program is different to running one, in HN-friendly terms).

Web Browser: conkeror

Email Client: emacs

Terminal: urxvt

IDE: emacs

File manager: emacs

Basic Text Editor: emacs

IRC/Messaging Client: emacs

PDF Reader: emacs + epdftools

Office Suite: n/a

Calendar: emacs

Video Player: n/a

Music Player: emacs

Photo Viewer: feh

Screen recording: n/a

I think that "no different" is a stretch here. The way you choose to communicate with someone to achieve an end is important in itself.

For a hyperbolic example, imagine you had a partner who wanted you to lose weight because you'd got fat and found you unattractive as a result. They choose speak kindly to you about how they feel to see whether they can change your behaviour, and own the possibility that you're not interested in what they have to say.

Is this <em>no different</em> to them using some subtly crafted speech (based on their in-depth knowledge of your insecurities, etc.) which creates some shame or self-doubt, whilst not making their real position or motive clear?

Or equally, one of your children's friends wants them to try a new legal high; in case (a) they describe how they find it and what it's like, and in case (b) they use some social pressure about how everyone's into it and it looks cool, etc.

Or you go to your doctor, and she offers you a new drug for your ailment; in the first case she describes the evidence base for it and any potential down-sides in statistical terms you can easily appreciate. In the second, she conjures an image of your ailment worsening progressively until you are a drag on your family and you die resented and alone; this is a possible but unlikely outcome if you leave the ailment untreated.

In all these examples the two paths are no different in terms of someone trying to influence someone into trying something out, but most people would find the first options preferable to the latter.

I think the point is not that all attempts to change someone's mind are manipulation and so completely morally equal, but that some kinds of manipulation are hurtful in themselves either because they are deceptive or because they hurt people.

A show HN post may be trying to manipulate you, but hopefully it is not using deceit or an emotional over-reach to do that.

I think the VR world is bothersome because you (and me, and many others) have some part of our value system or moral calculus that isn't a function of people's subjective experience but is to do with the arrangement of stuff in the highly contentious 'base reality'.

Wireheading gives a similar icky feeling; if we got everyone in the world some brain implants that made sure they were perfectly happy with their situation, no matter the situation, would the situation as a whole be morally better, worse, or equal to how it is now?

I would say worse, because somewhere in my morality look-up table it says that the happiness of a person who is sitting in a concrete cell with their brain wired up to induce happiness is less good than the happiness of a person listening to the symphony or whatever, even if their subjective reports would both be full of joy.

For me this holds true even if the hypothetical wirehead-world is setup in some way to make sure that people keep breeding or live forever in wirehead bliss or what have you; the situation's value is not just some sum of expected subjective 'utility scores' or something similar (apart from the "Repugnant Conclusion" which is another problem here).

This is probably a patronising and paternalistic kind of morality for me to have, but I'm OK with that (and secretly suspect a bit that people who claim to have a morality totally devoid of this sort of thing are either deluding themselves or lying).

I do like the idea of 50% scale world (although whether 50% scale world would actually work the same I don't know). Introspecting, that seems OK because it's still made of normal matter, which I must conclude has different moral value to simulated matter.

I think there are some studies from here in the UK which indicate that air quality may actually be worse inside motor vehicle cabins than it is outside [1].

This may be mitigated in newer vehicles with particulate filters, I am not sure. I don't know whether filters can eliminate NOX as well as PM2.5.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35504768

I have to agree - I think the benefits described for all these AR scenarios really don't sound worth the cost, at least to me.

In exchange for replacing all the plain simple switches in my house with a complex tower of software, hardware, and internet services I gain: the ability to turn the lights on and off without getting up, and in this scenario I lose: the ability to find the lightswitch when my AR glasses are broken / flat battery / in another room / running a firmware update.

This trade really is marginal in comparison to the things which have driven other technology adoptions, like shopping without going to the shops, or sending letters without walking to a postbox, or allowing one person to do the work of several others in the same time.

There may be other AR / VR functions which are more compelling, but so long as they are all "use this complicated and expensive new system to get this marginal benefit over something already honed to its niche" it ain't gonna fly.

It appears I am outside the edit window, but [3] should be https://github.com/larkery/zsh/blob/master/histdb-merge (no .zsh). Thanks for pointing that out.

I don't use a zsh package manager and don't really want to learn one, but if you can tell me the minimal glue I need to add to make these files into a package I will happily duplicate them into another repository and keep them up to date there. Ed.: https://github.com/larkery/zsh-histdb

I haven't done anything to import the history file because some of the information is missing so it would be a bit untidy. You could do something like

    history 0 | while read -r num line; do
        zshaddhistory "$line"
    done

For those on zsh I have something similar [1-2]. It hooks to zshaddhistory and stores the command, running time, CWD, hostname and exit status in a sqlite database, and provides a simple query command.

With a git merge driver [3] the history database can be kept in source control and shared between hosts.

Queries look a bit like

    $ histdb blah
    time   ses  dir         cmd
    09/02  24   ~           ogr2ogr temp/blah.shp 'WFS:http://environment.data.gov.uk/ds/wfs?SERVICE=WFS&INTERFACE=ENVIRONMENTWFS&VERSION=1.0.0&LC=3000000000000000000000000000000'
    09/02  24   ~/temp      cd blah.shp
    15/02  146  ~/.emacs.d  git commit -am "blah"
    22/02  175  ~           test="asdf/blah.shp"
    09:48  743  ~/.histdb   hist blah

[1] https://github.com/larkery/zsh/blob/master/sqlite-history.zs... [2] https://github.com/larkery/zsh/blob/master/self-insert-overr... [3] https://github.com/larkery/zsh/blob/master/histdb-merge.zsh

I think you have accidentally conflated "whoever wants them most" with whoever is willing and able to pay the most.

I am not sure how you would find out whether I want to live on the street where I grew up more than, for example, a billionaire Russian oligarch, but I think that even if I wanted it one thousand times more I would remain unable to afford it.

It may be that many other people gave the oligarch some money to show that they, in some exchange, had a total want for said oligarch to live there more than my want, but this is a different claim implying a very strong assumption about the addition and fungibility of wants, making them indistinguishable from money itself.

Responses of this form -- if X were worthwhile, X would already be happening; as X is not happening, it cannot be worthwhile -- are often proposed when talking about the economy. Is this not presuming the answer?

It reminds me of Leibniz's idea that we live in the best of all possible worlds [1], except the omniscience & efficiency of the market stand in for God.

If the way in which we hope the economy picks good outcomes involves people thinking of things that might be worth doing, trying them and then succeeding if they were right, we surely must allow that not all of the good ideas have already been had, and so we do not yet live in the best (most economic?) of all possible worlds?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_of_all_possible_worlds

You are right about the problem that efficiency in one place will potentially cause consumption in another. In the literature, this is usually called a 'rebound effect' or Jevons' paradox.

It may be that an emissions / extraction cap could be implemented non-globally so long as a large enough block were willing to participate, and so long as they imposed tariffs on any non-participants to price in the emissions happening on the other side of the border.

Unfortunately, the evidence so far:

- A consistent exponential growth in emissions - A consistent improvement in GDP/energy and a mild improvement in energy/CO2

raises the question: can technical efficiency gains reduce emissions? If so, can they do so rapidly enough to prevent catastrophe.

This question has been open since Jevons wrote about the use of coal in the Empire, but it is certainly not cut-and-dried.

In the case of your spotlights, there are several places for a rebound effect:

- You have more spare money; you spend that money on something else, which (perhaps) causes some emissions - You have avoided using some electricity, lowering the cost of electricity. This renders electricity useful for some other customer for whom it was previously marginal

And so on.

For efficiency gains alone to work, the new technology will have to be astounding enough to reduce the cost of energy below the marginal production cost for all the existing sources, and to allow us to chuck away all of the existing fossil fuel infrastructure without discomfort.

Otherwise we will just use astounding new technology along with all our old technologies, and do more stuff.

Efficiency gains (which will come, and are welcome and necessary) need to be coupled with a political limit on extraction of fuels to avoid this outcome, in my opinion.

I think you raise a good question; I further wonder whether the provability of outcomes is even sufficient to justify the kind of total procedural adherence which the ethereum folks (until recently!) advocated.

In normal contract law that doesn't have a blockchain in it there is a special moral "backstop" where a judge may find a contract to be unconscionable. An unconscionable contract may contain nothing forbidden by statute, but if it is found to be profoundly unjust in terms of its outcomes (not due to change in circumstance, but as a result of its formulation), then a judge can call the contract unconscionable and it is void.

This kind of latitude is really valuable, as it recognises the fact that things are pretty complicated and that in the end the law is there to ensure justice, not to mechanically interpret a set of rules.

So, even if you have a smart contract (or as I would call it "program") which can be proven to work a certain way, that may not be enough to guarantee that it is not going to give rise to bad outcomes. For example, say we have a proof showing that the program obeys some invariants, and one may even have such a proof generated automatically. This makes us feel confident - let us irreversibly bind our future actions to the output of the program! Blockchains be praised!

However, if the real invariant being aimed for is that the program's execution is "justice-preserving" (and I would say this is a good aim), then there is a grounding problem we have missed, where the prover needs to specify formally the nature of a just situation or action.

I believe a large number of person-years have already been spent on attempts to derive such an "ethics predicate", but if anyone has found it they have not yet bothered to demonstrate it. As a result if we wish to pursue justice, we end up falling back to the position taken by the ordinary law, and we might wonder quite why we decided to use 51% of all computing power for the rest of time to keep a ledger intact in the first place.