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Wild Ideas

hanson.gmu.edu

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Re: Wild Ideas

#51

Post by enginous »

aasarava wrote: post #13

#2, about health insurance, overlooks a big part of the RAND HIE's findings: people who were sick and poor in the study did have worse health outcomes.

Also, his idea of increasing taxes will mean that even if his statement were true ("[if] people only bought half as much, they would be just as healthy"), a flat increase in drug tax would at best make this effect true on average.

Due to higher taxation, low-income individuals would have even less access to medicine than today. Keeping people away from drugs with prohibitive taxation means starving entire demographics of this component of health care.

So sure, people who have the funds to take excessive amounts of medicine may be "just as healthy." Others would be considerably worse off.

Re: Wild Ideas

#52

Post by pinchyfingers »

icebraining wrote: post #49
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…

In your self-righteous anger, you clearly missed snitko's sarcasm. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6089775

Touché

Re: Wild Ideas

#53

Post by unimpressive »

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…

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?

Re: Wild Ideas

#54

Post by babesh »

1. Human cloning 2. Giant solar collectors the size of states 3. Pandemics 4. Self aware computers 5. Tailored assassination drugs to induce swift cancer 6. Colonies on the moon 7. Genetic alteration and enhancement 8. Thought control 9. Man and machine war like the Matrix

1. and 5. are mostly to occur first.

Re: Wild Ideas

#55

Post by sytelus »

derefr wrote: post #23
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…

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 as baby tryieng to sit up at 6 months.

Let's say you read the book Black List by Brad Thor and you had an awesome memory to remember everything. Your friend won't ask you about this novel by keywords. They will ask you questions like "What is the best way to steal a car?" or "How would you get rid of strangers chasing you?" or "what breed of dogs are very vicious when you signal but very friendly otherwise?". And you would be able to answer those questions, not only by quoting related text but also summarizing and enriching the information. This what the ideal search would look like... pretty much how you can converse with computer on Star Trek. That's why I said current search is just "keywords in a textbox", still a very far thing from making science fiction a reality.

Re: Wild Ideas

#56

Post by RKoutnik »

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?

As they get older, they accumulate stuff and realize the government's job in protecting said stuff. It's easy to be an idealist (in any direction) when you don't have to sacrifice anything for it.

Re: Wild Ideas

#57

Post by unimpressive »

jjoe wrote: post #42
snitko wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extracting all info out of the brains would be impractical. A lot of the things humans do we do because we are humans. Our emotions only make sense because they are mechanisms of survival and passing our genes. They would be quite impractical in a singularity (although, some other emotions, specific to the digital world, may be employed). So in a sense, I can only see one force in a post-singularity utopia, driving p…

What if the "info" is in the heart... And for those who downvoted, you need to read more about the functions of the heart besides blood pumping. The heart has neurons too and an electromagnetic field far stronger than the brain's. Update: some links The little brain on the heart: http://www.ccjm.org/content/74/Suppl_1/S48.full.pdf Does changing the heart mean changing personality? A retrospective inquiry on 47 heart…

Then exactly what would the brain be doing? Then how come when you poke around the brain it changes peoples behaviors?

How come people who get a heart transplant don't become different people?

Re: Wild Ideas

#58

Post by ankitml »

snitko wrote: post #38
snowwrestler wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The strongest argument against private law is that that is how law used to operate, and our ancestors deemed it so unworkable that they invented the system of open public law we know today.

Well, then maybe we could argue the same about religion: atheism and then pantheism didn't really work, so we invented organized religions with one major god. Relying on the wisdom of ancestors is a sure way to avoid growth and to not acquire knowledge, and it is precisely this trait in people through which they are usually manipulated.

You are making an assumtion that movement of society from atheism and pantheism towards religions was unworkable for the same reasons as polycentric law. It is equally possible that there were other reasons for religions to develop. Like power and all.

Weherein we have some evidence that such was not the case with moving towards public law.

Re: Wild Ideas

#59

Post by wikiburner »

goldfeld wrote: post #31
wikiburner wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's an even crazier version: we develop a quantum computer the size of Jupiter with seemingly infinite computational capacity, and "scan" and simulate the earth. Similar to how a sufficiently advanced AI application today could probably take an overview picture of a pool table at any point in a game, and deduce the past shots that had to be taken in order for it to result in it's current state, you might be able t…

That sounds enticing, but I think you could never rewind the state of the Earth without considering the variables external to it. If you couldn't also simulate anything that could alter the course of events, such as exposure to the Sun, I think you'd end up accumulating enough lossy transitions that the simulation would be rendered (ha) worthless in a deterministic sense. If we consider that only simulating the atoms…

Fair enough, although I bet with a "high-res" enough simulation and physics engine, you could probably account for most of those externalities that would impact the simulation via context clues, like (simplistic examples) crater == asteroid, increased radiation == solar flare, etc.

For example, if you took a video of a coin being tossed into a coin pond, and then CGIed the coin out of the video, you could probably hire a criminal forensics-style physicist who could go through the video frame by frame, and then tell you the type of coin, velocity, point of impact, etc. just based on the splash and ripples.

Re: Wild Ideas

#60

Post by ankitml »

jjoe wrote: post #42
snitko wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Extracting all info out of the brains would be impractical. A lot of the things humans do we do because we are humans. Our emotions only make sense because they are mechanisms of survival and passing our genes. They would be quite impractical in a singularity (although, some other emotions, specific to the digital world, may be employed). So in a sense, I can only see one force in a post-singularity utopia, driving p…

What if the "info" is in the heart... And for those who downvoted, you need to read more about the functions of the heart besides blood pumping. The heart has neurons too and an electromagnetic field far stronger than the brain's. Update: some links The little brain on the heart: http://www.ccjm.org/content/74/Suppl_1/S48.full.pdf Does changing the heart mean changing personality? A retrospective inquiry on 47 heart…

which info? you mean human memory? How is electromagnetic field of heart related to memory
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