Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capable mind of 40 with an imagination factor of .75 may only have the cumulative real-world experience of a 10-year-old.
Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry
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Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry
#12I think it’s difficult for us today to fully grasp the hope that the Russian Revolution brought to the working people. That hypotheses didn’t workout very well.
Now I'm curious: most of us are familiar with what the USSR did wrong, were they better or worse than the Tsars before them?
It kinda depends on how you measure.
Basic quality of life went up fast, going from feudal agriculture to an industrial society. But then it stalled. And the process killed literally millions -- some from outright murder, some from overwhelming mismanagement.
Many never wanted the Tsars gone to begin with; agricultural societies can be very conservative. And things had been slowly improving under the monarchy, under the same pressures that modernized western Europe in the mid 19th century. Historians cite a lot of mistakes by that last Tsar that could easily have gone the other way and saved the institution. He really screwed it up after a few generations of improvements.
So... depends.
Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry
#13I think it’s difficult for us today to fully grasp the hope that the Russian Revolution brought to the working people. That hypotheses didn’t workout very well.
Now I'm curious: most of us are familiar with what the USSR did wrong, were they better or worse than the Tsars before them?
One metric would be body count. 20th century Marxists are somewhere between 60 and 148 million dead. Hard to top that.
Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry
#14I think it’s difficult for us today to fully grasp the hope that the Russian Revolution brought to the working people. That hypotheses didn’t workout very well.
Now I'm curious: most of us are familiar with what the USSR did wrong, were they better or worse than the Tsars before them?
The early USSR was at least two orders of magnitude worse than the czars, if you score either by yearly executions or by yearly sent to Siberia.
And that's not evening counting the USSR's millions "resettled" in ethic operations, with about a 20%-25% death rate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...
And then we have the epic years in the 1920's of famine from screwing up the agricultural system, and selectively choosing ethic groups to take food from, the dwarf the famine deaths under the czars.
Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry
#15Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capa…
It's unclear to me what you're defining as real. Coal mining? Childcare? Community centers? Through hiking? Interesting theoretical realms can have enormous consequences in the physical/tangible world, as I'm sure you know :). Maybe it's more of a "presence factor" in relation to this story: a measure of how aware you are of the roles and responsibilities you have and how engaged with them you are.
Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry
#16I think it’s difficult for us today to fully grasp the hope that the Russian Revolution brought to the working people. That hypotheses didn’t workout very well.
Now I'm curious: most of us are familiar with what the USSR did wrong, were they better or worse than the Tsars before them?
Historians describe that Russian peasants pre-1917 were basically living in Medieval conditions. Russia didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1918! As flawed as Communism is, it did lurch Russians into the 20th century.
The Tsar and the aristocracy failed at their job. They deserved their fate, to be fired. Maybe Communism was the only way to drag Russian society, kicking and screaming, into the modern era that other European nations had attained, centuries earlier.
Unfortunately, Communism does not have the checks and balances of Capitalism, and it lends itself to abuse by tyrants and dictators.
Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry
#17Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capa…
It's unclear to me what you're defining as real. Coal mining? Childcare? Community centers? Through hiking? Interesting theoretical realms can have enormous consequences in the physical/tangible world, as I'm sure you know :). Maybe it's more of a "presence factor" in relation to this story: a measure of how aware you are of the roles and responsibilities you have and how engaged with them you are.
Of course, there is disagreement on a person’s roles and responsibilities.
To someone, my responsibility might be answering the doorbell quickly when Amazon drops off a package.
To another, it might be how responsive I am to email.
These are in conflict, and sometimes it’s worth missing an Amazon package to finish an important email.
Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry
#18Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capa…
> Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is"
If this world is a simulation, and someone among us is the player-character, forgetting that there is an off switch is a feature for them that increases immersion by making any failure to suspend disbelief (which I as a probable NPC suffer from regulary) a moot issue. As long as we think that this is reality, its believability is subordinate to its survivability.
Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry
#19Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capa…
You take a strange lesson from an anecdote about artificial super-intelligences. In the book, the AIs can spend time in a limitless virtual universe, better than reality.
Time spent in "infinite fun" (as they call it) has no value because it has no impact on what happens in the real world, hence the importance of remembering where the off-switch is. It's about having an effect on the world, not the world having an effect on you.
Someone who spends a lot of time (and in all likelihood is wired to spend a lot of time) thinking about their work is not wasting their time; they are preparing to have an effect on the world.
Re: Oscar Zariski was one of the founders of modern algebraic geometry
#20Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capa…
It's unclear to me what you're defining as real. Coal mining? Childcare? Community centers? Through hiking? Interesting theoretical realms can have enormous consequences in the physical/tangible world, as I'm sure you know :). Maybe it's more of a "presence factor" in relation to this story: a measure of how aware you are of the roles and responsibilities you have and how engaged with them you are.
I make no value judgement here. I thought the OP's post was interesting as an example of how humans can mediate their own "VR" experience, and have done so for all of human history. The "absent-minded professor" is a stereotype for a reason. It can be disconcerting for someone with high imagination factor to interact with someone with an imagination factor of 0, even if all other qualities (age, culture, language, etc) are the same, since the paths they have both walked are so very different. The error modes that arise from impedance mismatch go in both directions. It's not clear what nature will select for. Certainly over short periods of time, nature has selected for heavy abstraction and all the military/economic power it yields. The longer time frame has not yet played out.