J's Shortform

The karma system here seems to bully people into conforming to popular positions and philosophies. I don't see it having a positive impact on rationalism, or reducing bias. And it seems to create an echo chamber. This may sound like a cheap shot, but it's not: I've observed more consistent objectivity on certain reddit forums (including some that have nothing to do with philosophy or science).

I've been thinking about how most (maybe all) thought and intelligence are simulation. Whether we're performing a mathematical calculation, planning our day, or betting on a basketball game, it's all the same mental exercise of simulating reality. This might mean the ultimate potential of ai is the ability to simulate reality at higher and higher resolutions.

As an aside, it also seems that all scientific knowledge is simulation and maybe even all intellectual endeavors. Any attempt to understand or explain our reality is simulation. The essence of intelligence is reality simulation. Our brains are reality simulators and the ultimate purpose of intelligence is to simulate potential realities.

When people muse about reality being someone's dream, that might not be terribly far from the true nature of our universe.

the use of hidden strategies (that afford an advantage) by political contestants could make those contestants less likely to represent the will of the people upon election if those strategies helped them win despite appealing to the desires of the people less than they otherwise would have. 

this problem could be mitigated by requiring that political campaigns document all internal communications which transpire as part of the campaign and disclose them at the conclusion of the election. this would both a) raise awareness among voters about strategies political candidates are using and b) share the strategies with future political candidates, thereby eliminating the advantage those strategies afford. the premise here is that political candidates should win or lose primarily (or preferably, entirely) based on how well the candidates' policy positions represent the voters, how much faith the voters have in candidates' commitments to those positions, and how well voters believe the candidates would enact those policies.

(I realize donor money is the other major problem corrupting politics, and there may be different solutions for that)

The more I think about AI the more it seems like the holy grail of capitalism. If AI agents can themselves be both producers and consumers in a society, then they can be arbitrarily multiplied to expand an economy, and they have a far smaller cost in terms of labor cost, spatial cost, resource cost, healthcare cost, housing cost, etc. compared to humans. At the extreme, this seems to solve every conceivable economic problem with modern societies as it can create arbitrarily large tax revenue without the need to scale government services per ai agent the way they would need to be scaled per human.

I guess it's possible that, long-term, AI could obsolete money and capitalism, but presumably there could be a transitionary period where experience something like the aforementioned super-capitalism.

On moral realism... Physics causes all realities so if we're saying some phenomenon is objectively bad then we're saying Physics is objectively bad. But saying physics is objectively bad is meaningless.