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Wild Ideas

hanson.gmu.edu

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Re: Wild Ideas

#101

Post by TausAmmer »

unimpressive wrote: post #53
pinchyfingers wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[Edit: Self-righteous anger caused me to stop reading parent post mid-way through and start replying furiously. Nothing to see here.] Crazy anarchist. Because there have been no extremely intelligent, logical, level-headed and productive people who are also anarchists. Start with this guy and get back to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard If you said "crazy statist" I could maybe agree, since statism i…

Since we're now on the subject. I notice that there seems to be a very high turnover of young people from the various forms of anarchism as they get older. Would anybody who fits this description like to elaborate on why that happened? Found a convincing argument? General disillusionment with humanity?

At some point in your life you have your guitar, backpack and whatever you have on you. You have no attachments, nothing to loose, nothing to fight for. You can think freely, you have no need to lie and pretend. You can express your emotions without filters.

And you build your world on that, you see world might work well like that.

Then you get your job, car, house, 2 saplings, wife. You have to defend it, system that supports it and everything that holds it together.

Current system is very well alive, self replicating and with strong immunity, it is living intelligent being, completely different from human thinking and not really communicable in direct way.

It all is very interesting.

Re: Wild Ideas

#103

Post by 1_player »

snitko wrote: post #11

The author is obviously some kind of crazy anarchist. Private law system? You mean that all of a sudden people would become customers of multiple legal firms instead of subjects of one big system and will be able to choose laws they like while at the same time not interfering directly with others who chose different laws? You mean that all of a sudden majority would lose its power to dictate minorities how to live th…

That's an interesting argument there.

In my opinion, private law system is pretty much anarchism, since people tend to aggregate with similarly-minded people that share the same values and rules: rules and leadership tend to form spontaneously in human groups (since we actually are tribal animals).

I have the gut feeling that as we eliminate scarcity through technology a real anarchist system is possible. I just miss enough theory to back it up.

Does anyone know any good book/author talking about that?

Re: Wild Ideas

#104

Post by arethuza »

mjn wrote: post #86
arethuza wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If we keep writing down common sense datums until 2100, we can make computers as smart as people." Worth noting that this approach has already been tried: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc "Commonsense reasoning" has been around for a long time as an AI topic - like many AI topics it appears straightforward but is actually full of complexity.

Two other approaches, a bit messier but with bigger coverage: * ConceptNet ( http://conceptnet5.media.mit.edu/ ), I think the first major attempt at a "messier" crowdsourced commonsense-facts database. Not a carefully designed hierarchical ontology like Cyc, but rather a large set of lightly curated statements about natural-language nouns and verbs. Has the pros and cons you might expect: better coverage, and easier…

Cool - it's a long time since I paid much attention - I did research on commonsense qualitative models of engineering domains and that led to a personal interest in the wider issues of commonsense reasoning but at that time (early 90s) I ended up deeply skeptical of the approaches that were common then (in my case mostly various qualitative/sorted/temporal logics).

Re: Wild Ideas

#105

Post by danabramov »

Nux wrote: post #99
pawelwentpawel wrote: post #96

By 2100 we should be able to scan this info from a frozen brain. If we scan your brain and then build and run a computer simulation of it, someone who remembers being you would wake up and feel alive. Let's say we are actually able to do that by 2100. Somebody is scanning in patterns and current state of my neural activity. He copies that into a simulation - more than once. Which of the simulations will be me ? All o…

Ahh, the swampman! I always thought of this problem when watching characters in StarTrek using teleportation, didn't know it was an existing, famous problem. IMHO the teleported person ceases to exist at some point and a _new_ , identical person is being "created" by the transporter device. It's more of a gut feeling, hard to explain in words why I feel this way.

It's kinda intuitive, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong.

Imagine you fall in coma and sleep long enough that all your body cells have been changed. Do you wake up a different person? I don't think so.

What you perceive as yourself is the experience of being aware of everything you have learned in the world. An identical brain, whether created by teleport or running in simulation, is you just as much.

So yes, both simulations will be sure they are you (and in a sense, both will be you—if we allow the simulations, we must abandon the idea of there being only one “you” at the moment). The funny thing, these simulations will immediately diverge by obtaining different experiences, and thus can be thought of “forks” of you.

Re: Wild Ideas

#106

Post by arethuza »

clamprecht wrote: post #5

I have a "science-fictiony" idea that I haven't seen anywhere else yet. The idea is this: If we can see light from planets thousands of light years away, then we can see the past. Once our telescopes are good enough to basically do a "google maps" zoom-in on other planets, we will be able to watche the past on other planets. But then, if we can ever watch our own Earth from a thousand light years away, then we can se…

Greg Egan's short stort The Hundred-Light-Year-Diary has a mechanism for sending messages into our own past that sounds a bit like that.

Re: Wild Ideas

#107

Post by 1_player »

derleth wrote: post #82
Houshalter wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was an anarcho-capitalist for awhile. I thought it was the perfect system. There would be absolutely no incentives to do bad things. Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so. But I no longer think it's a perfect system. People don't behave like perfect rational market actors, there are edge cases lik…

> Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so. And we call that system a government. Seriously. Every time an anarchist seriously gets down to brass tacks about how their world would work, there's some agency by 'the people' which does things which have to be done, and it's indistinguishable from a govern…

> Seriously. Every time an anarchist seriously gets down to brass tacks about how their world would work, there's some agency by 'the people' which does things which have to be done, and it's indistinguishable from a government. It's just a Good Government, a Responsible Government, and, really, an Ideal Government.

Which are these "things which have to be done" that only a government could take care of?

Crime prevention? Does our government police prevent crime, or just punish criminals? I can argue that without any state-established law criminals would be punished, in some way or another.

Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.

One thing is for sure, we're not ready yet for anything like that, since many necessary services and resources are "scarse", and scarsity makes people fight for their survival with brutal results. But we're (slowly) solving scarsity through science and technology.

Re: Wild Ideas

#108

Post by derefr »

sytelus wrote: post #55
derefr wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scientific institution has stopped really paying that much attention to space (or computation, in relative terms), and has started paying attention to biotech and materials science instead. Not a one of those science-fiction authors thought to suggest "get your DNA sequenced for $100" in their wildest flights of fancy. Also, > search is still keywords in a textbox what else would you suggest? The "hard problem" p…

Current search would be pretty embarrassing to future generation as much as it is awesome to current generation. Right now you can find a page only if that page contains all keywords in it. In some cases, there are band-aids to include popular synonyms and correlated keywords or remove some keywords or suggest alternative keywords (spell check). If you think of it, this is very primitive, pretty much the same stage a…

Oh, I see where I was confused; you're not actually talking about "search" here. "Search" is the ML term for, basically, "finding something you previously stored, by using parts of it." Google is a search company. Search problems ultimately boil down to the simulation of an ideal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_hash_function generated from all the relevant data ever input. Search is an objective problem, best solved with lots and lots of Big Metal.

This, on the other hand, is recommendation--finding something you don't know you want, by clustering things together and modelling your desires and personality. Amazon and Netflix are recommendation companies. Recommendation problems ultimately "boil down to" a full Bayesian network modelling your own brain, so they can have the right context to answer you. Recommendation is a subjective problem, best solved, probably, with a neural implant or something which can literally "read your mind" to know what you would like the most even if you don't currently "want" anything in particular.

Re: Wild Ideas

#109

Post by ballard »

danabramov wrote: post #105
Nux wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, the swampman! I always thought of this problem when watching characters in StarTrek using teleportation, didn't know it was an existing, famous problem. IMHO the teleported person ceases to exist at some point and a _new_ , identical person is being "created" by the transporter device. It's more of a gut feeling, hard to explain in words why I feel this way.

It's kinda intuitive, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong. Imagine you fall in coma and sleep long enough that all your body cells have been changed. Do you wake up a different person? I don't think so. What you perceive as yourself is the experience of being aware of everything you have learned in the world. An identical brain, whether created by teleport or running in simulation, is you just as much. So yes, both simula…

Yep. It's a consequence of information entropy. Both start receiving different stimuli or have other subtle differences that make each different like twins. The ethics seem to be that each should have rights equal to exist (run) as egalitarian as any other, regardless of origin. Stopping is deleting is killing.

Re: Wild Ideas

#110

Post by arethuza »

danabramov wrote: post #105
Nux wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, the swampman! I always thought of this problem when watching characters in StarTrek using teleportation, didn't know it was an existing, famous problem. IMHO the teleported person ceases to exist at some point and a _new_ , identical person is being "created" by the transporter device. It's more of a gut feeling, hard to explain in words why I feel this way.

It's kinda intuitive, but I'm pretty sure it's wrong. Imagine you fall in coma and sleep long enough that all your body cells have been changed. Do you wake up a different person? I don't think so. What you perceive as yourself is the experience of being aware of everything you have learned in the world. An identical brain, whether created by teleport or running in simulation, is you just as much. So yes, both simula…

I occasionally find myself wondering whether it is the same "me" that wakes up in the morning as falls asleep the night before. So is it really the same instance of my consciousness that boots up in the morning as was shut down the night before?

Not the most productive thing to think about as you fall asleep :-)

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