LessWrong 2.0 Reader

One argument I've encountered is that sentient creatures are precisely those creatures that we can form cooperative agreements with.  (Counter-argument: one might think that e.g. the relationship with a pet is also a cooperative one [perhaps more obviously if you train them to do something important, and you feed them], while also thinking that pets aren't sentient.)

Another is that some people's approach to the Prisoner's Dilemma is to decide "Anyone who's sufficiently similar to me can be expected to make the same choice as me, and it's best for all of us if we cooperate, so I'll cooperate when encountering them"; and some of them may figure that sentience alone is sufficient similarity.

Intended for use in vacuum. I guess if it's more of a cylinder than a ring this wouldn't always be faster than an elevator system though.

The meeting allegedly happened on the 11th. The Iranian market rallied immediately after the election. It was clearly based on something specific to a Trump administration. Maybe it's large-scale insider trading from Iranian diplomats?

I also think the market genuinely, unironically disbelieves everything Trump says about tariffs in a way they don't about his cabinet nominations (pharma stocks tanked after RFK got HHS). 

The man literally wrote that he was going to institute 25% tariffs on Canadian goods, to exactly zero movement on Canadian stocks.

Right, eventually it will. But abstraction building is very hard! If you have any other option, like growing in size, I would expect it to be taken first.

I guess I should be a bit more precise. Abstraction building at the same level as before is probably not very hard. But going up a level is basically equivalent to inventing a new way of compressing knowledge, which is a quantitative leap.

I've never been familiar enough with group-theory stuff to memorize the names (which, warning, also might mean that it will take you a lot of time to write a sufficiently-dumbed-down version), but the internet suggests $\tilde{I}so(n,1)$ is related to... the Minkowski metric? I would be flabbergasted to learn that something so specific-to-our-universe was relevant to this toy mathematical contraption.

Presumably the 'Orcs on our side' refers to the Soviet Union.

I think that, if that's what he meant, he would not have referred to his son as "amongst the Urukhai." - he wouldn't have been among soviet troops. I think it is referring back to turning men and elves into orcs - the orcs are people who have a mindset he doesn't like, presumably to do with violence.

Agree on this criticism for the difference between humans and pigs, but there too many orders of magnitude of difference between shrimp and human to consider detailed measures of computing power very necesary.

Quantifying empathy is intrinsically hard, because everything begins by postulating (not observing) consciousness in a group of beings, and that is only well grounded for humans. So, at the end, even if you are totally successful in developing a theory of human sentience, for other beings you are extrapolating. Anything beyond solipsism is a leap of faith (unlike you find St. Anselm ontological proof credible). 

After being "launched" from the despinner, you would find yourself hovering stationary next to the ring.

Air resistance.

That is, however, basically the system I proposed near the end, for use near the center of a cylinder where speeds would be low.

This happened to Explorer 1, the first satellite launched by the United States in 1958. The elongated body of the spacecraft had been designed to spin about its long (least-inertia) axis but refused to do so, and instead started precessing due to energy dissipation from flexible structural elements.

picture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explorer_1#/media/File:Explorer1.jpg

Illusionism is not a competitor, because consciousness is obviously an illusion. That is immediate since Descartes. That is why you cannot distinguish between "the true reality" and "matrix": both produce a legitimate stream of illusory experience ("you"). 

Epiphenomenalism is physicalist in the sense that it respects the autonomy and closeness of the physical world. Given that we are not p-zombis (because there is an "illusory" but immediate difference between real humans and p-zombies), that difference is precisely what we call “consciousness”.  

Descartes+Laplace=Chalmers. 

In fact, there is only one scape: consciousness could play an active role in the fundamental Laws of Physics. That would break the Descartes/Laplace orthogonality, making philosophy interesting again.