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My new TAP for the year is - When I fail: try twice more. Then stop.

I'm persistent but unfortunately I don't know when to quit. I fall a foul of that saying "the definition of insanity is to try the same thing over and over again and expect different results". Need a pitch for a client? Instead of one good one I'll quota fill with 10 bad ones. Trying to answer a research question for a essay - if I don't find it in five minutes, guess I'm losing my whole evening on a Google Books/Scholar rabbit hole finding ancillary answers.

By allowing myself only two more tries but no more, that should mean that I get three failures instead of burnout-1 failures. It should mean I'll be, per the saying, less insane.

Three is an arbitrary number, it could easily be 4 or 5, but if I had to post-rationalize it then it would be: if you fail three consecutive times, then your chance of success was lower than 33.3% which means you need a better tactic or approach.

Three is a good balance between repetition without causing burnout, it also is low investment, which means that it encourages me to try again, and quickly.

Of course this approach only works if there is a postmortem. Try twice more, stop, then analyze what happened.

I can't say I'm proud of the fact that I need such a simple rule. But if it works, then I shouldn't feel ashamed for improving my behavior because of it.

 

“The reasons why super human AI is a very low hanging fruit are pretty obvious.”

“1) The human brain is meager in terms of energy consumption & matter.”

“2) Humans did not evolved to do calculus, computer programming & things like that.”

“3) Evolution is not efficient.”

“Neural networks don't need to have immaculate design -- otherwise human intelligence never would have evolved in the 1st place”

(Meta: Apologies for running the clock, but it is 1:45am where I am and I'm too sleepy to keep going on this thread, so I'm bowing out for tonight. I want to respond further, but I'm on vacation right now so I do wish to disclaim any expectations of a speedy follow-up.)

I maintain that biological humans will need to do population control at some point. If they decide that enacting the population control in the solar system at a later population leve is worth it for them to dismantle the Sun, then they can go for it. My guess is that they won't, and will have population control earlier. 

I think that the coder looking up and saying that the Sun burning is distasteful but the Great Transhumanist Future will come in 20 years, along with a later mention of "the Sun is a battery", together implies that the Sun is getting dismantled in the near future. I guess you can debate in how strong the implication is, maybe they just want to dismantle the Sun in the long term, and currently only using the Sun as a battery in some benign way, but I think that's not the most natural interpretation.

Yeah, maybe I just got too angry. As we discussed in other comments, I believe that astronomical acceleration perspective the real deal is maximizing the initial industrialization of Earth and its surroundings, which does require killing off (and mind uploading) the Amish and everyone else. Sure, if people are only arguing that we should only dismantle the Sun and Earth after millennia, that's more acceptable, but I really don't see what's the point then, we can build out our industrial base on Alpha Centauri by then. 

The part that is frustrating to me that neither the original post, nor any of the commenters arguing with me are not caveating their position with "of course, we would never want to destroy Earth before we can save all the people who want to live in their biological bodies, even though this is plausibly the majority of the cost in cosmic slow-down". If you agree with this, please say so, and I still have quarrels about removing people to artificial planets if they don't want to go, but I'm less horrified. But so far, no one was willing to clarify that they don't want to destroy Earth before saving the biological people, and I really did hear people say in private conversations things like "we will immediately kill all the bodies and upload the minds, the people will thank us later once they understand better" and things of that sort, which makes me paranoid.

Ben, Oliver, Raemon, Jessica, are you willing to commit to not wanting to destroy Earth if it requires killing the biological bodies of a significant number of non-consenting people? If so, my ire was not directed against you and I apologize to you.

Twenty years seems indeed probably too short, though it’s hard to say how post-singularity technology will affect things like public deliberation timelines. 

My best guess is 200 years will very likely be enough.

I agree with you that there exist some small minority of people who will have a specific attachment to the sun, but most people just want to live good and fulfilling lives, and don’t have strong preferences about whether the sun in the sky is exactly 1 AU away and feels exactly like the sun of 3 generations past. Also, people will already experience extremely drastic change in the 20 years after the singularity, and my sense is marginal cost of change is decreasing, and this isn’t the kind of change that would most affect people’s lived experience. 

To be clear, for me it’s a crux whether not dismantling the sun is basically committing everyone who doesn’t want to be uploaded to relative cosmic poverty. It would really suck if all remaining biological humans would be unable to take advantage of the vast majority of the energy in the solar system. 

I am not at present compelled that the marginal galaxies are worth destroying the sun and earth for (though I am also not confident it isn’t, I feel confused about it, and also don’t know where most people would end up after having been made available post-singularity intelligence enhancing drugs and deliberation technologies, which to be clear not everyone would use, but most people probably would). 

The 2019 LW post [LW · GW] discusses a podcast which talks a lot about gears-y models and proposed mechanisms; as I understand it, the high level "zinc ions inhibit viral replication" model is fairly well accepted, but some of the details around which brands are best aren't as well-attested elsewhere in the literature. For instance, many of these studies don't use zinc acetate, which this podcast would suggest is best. (To its credit, the 2013 meta-analysis does find that acetate is (nonsignificantly) better than gluconate, though not radically so.)

I thought it'd be useful for others to link to your longer writings on this: 

• Consider granting AIs freedom [EA · GW]
• The moral argument for giving AIs autonomy [EA · GW] 

I expect non-positional material goods to be basically saturated for Earth people in a good post-Singularity world, so I don't think you can promise them to become twice as rich. And also, people dislike drastic change and new things they don't understand. 20% of the US population refused the potentially life-saving covid vaccine out of distrust of new things they don't understand. Do you think they would happily move to a new planet with artificial sky maintained by supposedly benevolent robots? Maybe you could buy off some percentage of the population if material goods weren't saturated, but surely not more than you could convince to get the vaccine? Also, don't some religions (Islam?) have specific laws about what to do at sunrise and sunset and so on? Do you think all the imams would go along with moving to the new artificial Earth? I really think you are out of touch with the average person on this one, but we can go out to the streets and interview some people on the matter, though Berkeley is maybe not the most representative place for this. 

(Again, if you are talking about cultural drift over millennia, that's more plausible, though I'm below 50% they would dismantle the Sun. But I'm primarily arguing against dismantling the Sun within twenty years of the Singularity.)