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Wild Ideas

hanson.gmu.edu

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Re: Wild Ideas

#111

Post by rwallace »

pinchyfingers wrote: post #48
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…

[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…

PSA: Whenever you're going to use sarcasm on the Internet, don't. Seriously, just don't. Write a straight comment instead. As demonstrated here, when you don't have tone of voice as a cue, sarcasm is just not reliably recognizable.

Re: Wild Ideas

#112

Post by icebraining »

1_player wrote: post #103
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…

Not serious theory, but James P. Hogan's Voyage from Yesteryear is based on the creation of a new post-scarcity anarchist society, and the meeting between it and the "old society". Spoiler: it's not all hugs and singing Kumbaya.

It's certainly a compelling vision - at least to me - but it's not exactly a political treaty.

Re: Wild Ideas

#113

Post by sytelus »

some_guy_there wrote: post #95
Houshalter wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how much did the internet actually improve people's lives or change things? The major changes of our time are nowhere near as major as the ones of the last two centuries. Industrialization and mass production and trains and electricity, and massive population growth, and crazy amounts of scientific progress. Almost all of the major improvements happened early on in the century, not so much in recent times. All th…

Mass use of shipping container in 1970s alone has changed more lives than all those inventions from 1930 to 1970 combined.

Seriously? The way I see it, containers made transport of goods more efficient. Without containers, it was still possible to have all the goods, may be at higher prices, but possible.

Re: Wild Ideas

#114

Post by eoinmurray92 »

Xcelerate wrote: post #93
Symmetry wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

QM provides a clear set of equations that govern how wavefunctions evolve, but some versions also include the notion that wavefunctions collapse when an observation is made, but there are no equations or even firm rules for when this collapse is supposed to happen. Many-worlds is founded on the observation that the equations governing wavefunctions are sufficient in and of themselves to explain the observations that…

> ... but there are no equations or even firm rules for when this collapse is supposed to happen That's why it isn't science ;) Maybe when QM was being developed "collapse" was a debated concept; I'm not too familiar with its history. Currently though, modern QM predicts that ensembles of identically prepared systems select an eigenstate of the linear operator corresponding to whatever observable it is you're measuri…

> I see no implications of collapse with this -- just probabilities of what values you will obtain in experiment.

Not exactly, your statement is correct for single states, however it breaks down for entangled states. When one wavefunction describes two or more particle a measurement on one particle can be thought of collapsing the two particle wavefunction, which then forces the other particle into a well defined state.

Edit, I am not arguing in favour many worlds theory, only that the 'collapse' of the wavefunction is a well developed and useful idea in quantum physics.

Re: Wild Ideas

#115

Post by puzzlingcaptcha »

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…

I will be your resident biologist tonight (not working in cognition/memory but I will try to make a more general point).

Putting aside the philosophical problems for a moment, the notion that the only relation between a brain and a mind is the pattern of neuronal connections is pretty naive.

The formation and maintenance of memory is controlled at multiple levels: single atoms (ionic gradients determining the polarization of neurons), small chemicals and hormones (e.g. neurotransmitters in the synapses and signalling peptides), DNA (epigenetic control, mainly methylation), proteins (constant synthesis and degradation in the process of memory consolidation and long-term potentiation) and finally cells (pattern of connections between neurons).

I highlight these different levels because they are formed by compounds that are very different from a biological and chemical point of view. You can't just snap-freeze them all in their place. And freezing is the easy part -- how do you thaw a brain and preserve the state of all these components (all of which have different thermodynamic properties)?

Assuming you don't want to thaw it but, as the article suggests, 'scan it' you would have to be able to determine the conformation and activation state of each involved protein and compound, along with all their density gradients in intracellular spaces... Not by 2100, sorry.

Biology is hard because it's all relations, thresholds, gradients and fuzzy logic. To escape this probabilistic haze into a clean world of ones and zeroes -- I read HN.

Re: Wild Ideas

#116

Post by icebraining »

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…

(Playing Devil's advocate)

> 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.

The problem here is the foolish tendency of English speaking people to use "government" for everything, when we should distinguish the government from the State.

Anarchists are obviously not opposed to having systems of government, but they are opposed to the state (and governments as their executive bodies), and in general to the concentration of power, authoritarianism and repression that emerge from it.

Re: Wild Ideas

#117

Post by hrvbr »

ricardobeat wrote: post #21
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…

It's called Polycentric Law[1] and people who actually think it's a good idea seem to exist in larger than zero quantities. See this entertaining thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5009244 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycentric_law

Also http://www.panarchy.org/

Re: Wild Ideas

#118

Post by berekuk »

apl wrote: post #88
Xcelerate wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Many times each day, your mind permanently splits into different versions that live in different worlds. True. The many-worlds interpretation is nonsense. It's not even science. It makes no testable predictions that differ from any of the other interpretations. I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds". Quantum mechanics provides a very clear set of postulates that allow the prediction of va…

> I've never understood the weird fascination with "many-worlds". In addition to the parsimony/redundancy argument already brought up, our weird fascination with "many worlds" should be utterly obvious from a psychological perspective. It's a powerful, potentially soothing thought: anything that could have been has been, in some strange way. Thinking about the "what if" constitutes a deeply human tendency (or weaknes…

All our fears, too.

Re: Wild Ideas

#119

Post by utopkara »

Some of these comments cannot be falsified: - You could be a computer. - There could be a colony on earth millions of years ago.

Oh, and he is an economist too! How appropriate. Yep, Dr Hanson, keep up the good work.

Re: Wild Ideas

#120

Post by sytelus »

sergiosgc wrote: post #87
sytelus wrote: post #15

Yes, wild ideas except for the "2100" part. The scientific and engineering breakthroughs have been slowing down dramatically in past 50 years or so. Science fiction from 60s and 70s is embarrassingly filled with predictions such as we would have colonies in space, computers indistinguishable from humans, flying cars on street, humankind without poverty and end of cancer by 2020. How close are we? If we go back in tim…

Please go read Kurzweil. Scientific advancement is dead on track on an exponential curve. Moore's law is still accurate. Will it keep this rate as Kurzweil postulates? I have no idea. Until now, though, he's correct. Comparing tech today with sci-fi of the past is wrong. Predictions fail both ways: there's lots of tech we do have that is missing in sci-fi.

Kurzweil has been getting it right because his near-term predictions are pretty safe bets, many of them true in some form even in 2000. For examples,

* Research has been initiated on reverse engineering the brain through both destructive and non-invasive scans.

* Autonomous nanoengineered machines have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls.

* People can talk to their computer to give commands.

He has crafted his long term predictions such a way that 8 out of 10 are pretty trivial and 2 most likely to go wrong. No wonder he often claims 80% success rate. For example, for 2020 he is predicting trivial stuff like this which has been in works already since he started predicting:

* Computers are embedded everywhere in the environment (inside of furniture, jewelry, walls, clothing, etc.).

* People experience 3-D virtual reality through glasses and contact lenses that beam images directly to their retinas (retinal display). Coupled with an auditory source (headphones), users can remotely communicate with other people and access the Internet.

* People are able to wirelessly access the Internet at all times from almost anywhere

* Nanotechnology is more capable and is in use for specialized applications, yet it has not yet made it into the mainstream. "Nanoengineered machines" begin to be used in manufacturing.

However his non-trivial predictions are almost guerenteed to be false:

* By 2020, there will be a new World government.

* The basic needs of the underclass are met.

* Most human workers spend the majority of their time acquiring new skills and knowledge.

* Phone calls entail three-dimensional holographic images of both people.

The point is predicting long term future is not just hard, it's impossible. But there is an expectation from long term future that sets our sense of progress and achievements.

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