Tahp's Shortform

This is unoriginal, but any argument that smart AI is dangerous by default is also an argument that aliens are dangerous by default. If you want to trade with aliens, you should preemptively make it hard enough to steal all of your stuff so that gains from trade are worthwhile even if you meet aliens that don't abstractly care about other sentient beings.

A decision-theoretic case for a land value tax.

You can basically only take income tax by threatening people. "Give me 40% of your earnings or I put you in prison." It is the nicest type of threatening! Stable governments have a stellar reputation for only doing it once per year and otherwise not escalating the extortion. You gain benefit from the stable civilization supported by such stable governments because they use your taxes to pay for it. But there's no reason for the government to put you in prison except for the fact that they expect you to give them money not to. By participating, you are showing that you will respond to threats, which is an incentive to extract more wealth from you. If enough people understood decision theory and were dissatisfied by the uses the government put their money to, they could refuse to pay and the prison system wouldn't be big enough to deal with it. Oops, it's time to overthrow the government.

Under a better land value tax, the consequence for not paying your taxes is that the government takes the land away and gives it to someone else. They aren't threatening you, they're just reassigning their commitment to protect the interests of the person who uses the land over to a user who will pay them for the service. Of course, people can still all refuse to do it if they don't like the uses to which government puts their money, and from the point of view of the person paying taxes, it's still pretty much a case of "pay up or something bad will happen to you," so some would argue that the difference is mostly academic. That said, I really prefer to have a government which does not have "devise ways to make people miserable for the purpose of making them miserable" (you know, prison as a threat) as a load-bearing element of its mechanisms of perpetuating itself.

This argument flagrantly stolen from planecrash: https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1721794#reply-1721794 Of course planecrash also offers an argument for what gives a hypothetical government the right to claim ownership for the land: https://www.projectlawful.com/replies/1773744#reply-1773744 I was inspired to write this by Richard Ngo's definition of unconditional love at https://x.com/richardmcngo/status/1872107000479568321 and the context of that post.

I think that our laws of physics are in part a product of our perception, but I need to clarify what I mean by that. I doubt space or time are fundamental pieces in whatever machine code runs our universe, but that doesn't mean that you can take perception-altering drugs and travel through time. I think that somehow the fact that human intelligence was built on the evolutionary platform of DNA means that any physics we come up with has to build up to atoms which have the chemical properties that make DNA work. Physics doesn't have to describe everything, it just needs to describe the things relevant to DNA, which is in fact a lot! DNA can code the construction things which react to electromagnetic fields correlated with all sorts of physical processes.

This leads me to the question of what would it look like to see an alien that runs on different physics on the same universe platform through our physics. As an example which I haven't thought through rigorously, you can formulate non-relativistic quantum mechanics with momentum and position operators, but you move back and forth between them with Fourier transforms which only differ by a sign flip. You could make a self-consistent physics by just exchanging all of the momentum and position operators with each other. Maybe you could end up with localized atoms which are near each other and interacting in momentum space but diffuse nonsense in our native position space. If you build life in that universe, maybe it doesn't have localized structure in ours, and maybe it just acts like diffuse energy or something to us.