Stupid Questions April 2015

Best way to find out is to ask the LWer Vika, who I'm pretty sure was the driving force (Max Tegmark probably had something to do with it too). I think their niche is to be a more celebrity-centered face of existential risk reduction (compared to FHI), but they've also made some moves to try to be a host of discussions, and this grant really means that now they have to play funding agency.

Amusing idea, but I don't think there is any relation. For example, the discovery of nuclear structure strongly lowered the complexity of our description of nature but implied a huge amount of previously unknown available energy.

My personal epistemology says no, and that Occam's Razor is generally useful no matter which universe you find yourself in regardless of how it is structured.

Aren't there physics equations describing processes which are believed not be driven by thermodynamics, which are nevertheless still simple and elegant?

I never watched CSI: Cyber. That said:

Yes.

:)

Setting up a trust fund to pay whoever resurrects you would help.

The first attempts at reviving are going to focus on testing the resurrection method. I'm not sure if you want to be in that bunch.

If you want then it's important for the people who resurrect you to check whether your personality is intact or changed.

If you would fill out a personality test every month and that test would provide stable values before your death, it would be interesting to check whether your personality stays stable.

Having a complex Anki deck that contains information about cards that should be in your mind would also be useful for that purpose.

People who ask this sort of question assume that the cryonics era just comes and goes in a few decades. I find it more likely that cryonics or its successor technologies will become part of mainstream medicine indefinitely. If you have an illness or injury (probably some new kind of pathology we haven't seen yet) that the health care providers in, say, the 22nd Century don't know how to treat, they would put you in some kind of biostasis for attempted revival in, say, the 24th Century, when medicine has advanced enough to know what to do.

So why would people in the 22nd Century want to revive and rejuvenate and transhumanize people from the 21st Century? Well, they might return the favor for their resuscitators in the 24th Century.

Say that, in thirty-plus years, you're still alive and I've been cryonically preserved for a while. What could I have done during my life to convince you to apply your finite resources to resurrect me, rather than someone else?

Say that, in thirty-plus years, you're still hale and hearty and I've been seriously ill for a while. What could I have done during my life so far to convince you to apply your finite resources to heal me, rather than someone else?

Say that, in thirty-plus years, you're still alive and I've been cryonically preserved for a while. What could I have done during my life to convince you to apply your finite resources to resurrect me, rather than someone else?

You signed a contract allowing people developing resuscitation technology to use you as one of their first experimental human revivals.

ETA: Someone has to be the first attempted revival, but I suspect that it may be last in, first out. The later you get frozen, the better the freezing technology, and the sooner the technology to reverse it will be developed. By the time people can be frozen and thawed routinely, there will still be vaults full of corpsicles that no-one knows how to revive yet. All the people in Alcor today might eventually be written off as beyond salvaging.

You would need to be able to provide value for me - so you would need to have skills (or the ability to gain skills) that are still in expensive and in demand, and society would need to give me an enforceable right to extract that value from you. Slavery or indentured servitude, perhaps.

Consequentialist ethics would suggest the answer is yes, but in your example perhaps a better result would be getting the same placebo effect benefits from some kind of treatment or remedy that might actually work in itself, beyond placebo. Indulging woo isn't necessary to get positive expectation health benefits.

Knowing about the placebo effect doesn't stop the placebo effect from kicking in.

Anyway, I'd say that there are moments when comforting lies may be worth it, but I don't trust my ability to know when those moments are happening and it would raise my overall believability if I was found out.

I'd say that there are times when it's worth having comforting lies, but you can't figure out when if you're under the effect of comforting lies, so you should follow the strategy of never listening to comforting lies.

1) hardly, but then again, what is the minimum % of world population do you expect to be convincable? It doesn't have to be everybody. 2) what are the minuses of this technology? Illegal trade in real meat will thrive, for example, and the animals would live in even worse conditions. 3) I think poverty might contribute to meat consumption, if we're speaking about not starving people but, say, large families with minimal income. Meat makes making nutritious soups easy.

1. have ingredients that cannot be used as finger food (I have no self-control)

There no problem with eating vegetables as finger food anyway.

No, since "no matter what changes the future brought" includes changes of religion.

ETHICAL INJUNCTION:

Any moral reasoning that results in "...and I will be miserable for the rest of my life" that is not extremely difficult to prevent and has few other tradeoffs is probably not correct, no matter how well-argued.

Assuming they only married me because they knew I was never going to leave them, no it isn't.

I don't consider it moral for two people to make each other suffer for years instead of admitting their mistake and moving on with their lives. That's the result of pride, not forbearance. Still worse if one party suffers while the other remains pleased.

If there are severe practical obstacles to divorce then that's one thing, but even then there are ways around that. It's nothing unusual for a couple to separate while remaining married. For example, Warren Buffett had such an arrangement for nearly 30 years--until his wife died.

So now I'm praying for the end of time
To hurry up and arrive
'Cause if I gotta spend another minute with you
I don't think that I can really survive
I'll never break my promise or forget my vow
But God only knows what I can do right now
I'm praying for the end of time, It's all that I can do
Praying for the end of time so I can end my time with you

--Meatloaf

File this under "things that could probably be said better, but which might be better said than not said given I won't action it for later".

Whenever I see a post or question of the type "is X moral", I have an instinctual aversive reaction because such questions seem to leave so much that still needs to be asked, and the important questions are not even addressed, so even taking a potshot at the question requires wheeling some rather heavy equipment up to do some rather heavy digging as to the values, priorities, risk tolerance, etc of the person asking the question.

Re "the important questions are not even addressed": Fundamentally, are you trying to satisfice or maximize here? Are you trying to figure out the "optimal" action per those values that you group in the "morality" category, or are you trying to figure out which actions have an acceptable impact in terms of those values (such that you're then going to choose between the acceptable possibilities with a different set of values?) Once the meta's taken care of, what are the actual things that you value? Inferential distance is often pretty humongous in this regard, so more explicit often is better.

Maybe a more concrete example will be useful. If I ask you "what computer should I buy?", I should not take an immediate answer seriously with no further info, because I know you have no way of knowing what my decision criteria are (and its kinda hard for your recommendation to align with them by chance.) As such, I would probably want to give you a decent amount of information regarding my relevant preferences if I ask for such a recommendation...am I going to play games? Office work? Might even be useful to specify the type of games I'm playing and whether graphics are a biggie for me, etc.

When I don't see this type of info flow occurring, it feels like a charade, because if I were the one asking the question I would have to discard any answers that I got in the absence of such info about preferences, etc.

Again, apologies for going meta + possibly abrasive tone at the same time. Just trying to help discussions like this get started off on the right foot, as it feels like I see them more and more lately. Probably tapping out.

ETA punctuation.

This sounds like a place where Kantian ethics would give the right answer. I think, there is some point at which it would be stupid to not seek divorce, and some point at which the promise you made is indeed more important, and the thing that differentiates those two states is not whether you want divorce now, but whether which procedure would it be better for people to follow - the one that has you stay married here, or the one that has you divorce here.

The issue is with the decision, so asking "Is it moral?" is a potentially misleading framing because of the connotations of "moral" that aren't directly concerned with comparing effects of alternative actions. So the choice is between the scenario where a person made promises etc. and later stuck with them while miserable, and the scenario where they did something else.

Suppose you became deeply religious as a young adult

This assumes that different kinds of religiosity tend to converge on similar ethics about marital commitments and fidelity. You could become "deeply religious" in a way which allows for divorce or outside relationships.

This also assumes that your religion's doctrine on these matters remains stable over many generations. If your religious community accepts 22nd+ Century medicine and permits its members to seek treatment for engineered negligible senescence and superlongevity, then you could live long enough to see your religion undergo a Reformation-like event which allows for a more flexible view of marriage and sexual relationships.

I think I've mentioned this before, but I find Ridley Scott's portrayal of Future Christians in the film Prometheus interesting. The space ship's archaeologist character, Elizabeth Shaw (played by Swedish actress Noomi Rapace), wears a cross and professes christian beliefs at a time when christianity has apparently gone into decline and christians have become relatively uncommon. Yet as a single christian woman she has a sexual relationship with a man on the ship, which suggests that christian sexual morality during that religion's long twilight will tend to converge with secular moral views.

Identity may be continuous, but it is not unchanging. You are not the person you were back then and are not required to be bound by their precommitments. No more than by someone else's precommitments. To be quasi-formal, the vows made back then are only morally binding on the fraction of your current self which are left unchanged from your old self.Or something like that.

If you pay Saudia Arabia to produce less, then someone else will produce more unless you pay them not to, too. And any of them could secretly overproduce the lower quota.

AND once you've lowered the supply, then the price will rise, making the number of potentially profitable oil-producing states rise, increasing the number of people you need to pay off, and increasing the amount you need to pay each one.

The amount of fossil fuels extracted in a year is equal to the amount of fossil fuels burned in a year (give or take reserves, which will even out in the long run).

Fossil fuels are used for purposes other than burning. They are used in making plastic, in making fertilizer and in synthesizing chemicals as well.

Deferment (producing later instead of now) is really expensive if you are using a reasonable discount rate, so this would be quite expensive. I think your plan would also constrain supply, raising the oil/gas price and making the cost even higher.

If you want to ballpark costs, try deferring whatever fraction you like of us oil prod for, say, 10 years. Try a discount rate of 7-8% and figure out the costs/year. I would assume oil price of at least 80/bbl if you are trying to estimate costs on a reasonable timescale.

If nothing else, because it would be prohibitively expensive. Globally, something like 70 million barrels of oil are produced per day. The total value of all barrels produced in a year varies depending on the price of oil, but at a highish but realistic $100bbl, you're talking about two and a half trillion US dollars per year. If you were to reduce the supply by introducing a 'buyer' (read: subsidy to defer production) for some large percentage of those barrels, then the price would go even higher; this project would probably cost more than the entire global military budget combined, with no immediate practical or economic benefits.

The main thing you want to do when you want to reduce fossil fuel extraction is to outlaw fracking and make it harder by vetoing pipeline bills.

Paying Saudi Arabia to lower extration rates while at the same time increasing fracking production makes no sense.

It costs a lot of money and only defers the problem. Extracting less coal and less oil doesn't do much to address increasing energy demands. You'll get some decrease when the price goes up from restricting supply, but once thing stabilize it's going to continue rising.

Basically, you're temporarily reducing emissions without addressing the circumstances that brought about high emissions in the first place.

I hate humans.

If this is representative of your usual conversation style, then everyone above a certain level of competence will correctly infer that they should avoid you. This will leave you with conversation partners that are far below average. Your other statements make me think that this has, in fact, happened.

I used to think I could change them.

This is a difficult skill. The first step, if you truly want to change someone, is to establish mutual respect. If they think you don't like them, they will resist all attempts to influence them. This is definitely the right strategic move on their part, and even if they don't think about strategy at all, their instincts and emotions will guide them to it. If you think that you should be able to convince people of things, with this style of writing or this style of writing translated into speech, then you have misunderstood the nature of social interaction and you need to study the basics with the humility of a beginner.

Our culture typically presents rationality as opposed to emotion; I believe that a disproportionate number of misanthropes are drawn to rationality for that reason.

However, logic is meaningless without having an underlying goal, and goals are generally determined by one's emotions. What are your goals?

I find that thinking of other people as inferior or irrational is not particularly helpful in accomplishing my objectives. I feel less stress and make more progress by recognizing that other people have different goals than I do.

It is possible to get others (even "irrational" others) to help you accomplish your goals by offering to help them with theirs.

Possibly I don't understand your situation ("devolved" doesn't make sense to me except as Star Trek syence, a word I just invented based on the name SyFy. It could be a more polite version of 'syfyces'.)

But I find it useful to remind myself that humans have no evolutionary reason to be perfectly rational. I tell myself that if any future I hope for comes to pass, the people there will see us (at the present time) as particularly foolish children who, rather horribly, age and die before growing up.

I self-describe as a rationalist and I don't like humans that much at all. Don't know how common this is.

I like humans well enough when
-I can have a sensible interaction with them
-Or, they are willing to accommodate my needs with needing an explanation for everything
-Or, if I can manage their irrationality with a strategy that has a low cost to myself

Otherwise, I don't like humans very much or at all. Maybe disappointed? I wouldn't say hate (though the thought does come up).

I have been depressed. I've learned to deal with it, and I don't feel I'm depressed now, though I am probably at risk for depression.

Mostly I try to do things for myself. And to put myself in a position where I won't depend on any individual human for anything vital, and to have resources for as much self-reliance as possible.

[Do you self-identify as a misanthrope:]{yes}{no}{just show me the results}

This doesn't answer your question, but if you conclude that adding water is likely to make rice more filling per calorie (I have no idea whether it will), the dish you want is called congee, and searching for that should yield many delicious recipes.

I don't know about varying the amount of water. But if you want to eat fewer calories of rice, there was an article that came out recently saying that the method you use to prepare it could affect the amount of calories your body actually absorbed from it.

More water will also absorb a greater portion of water-soluble vitamins.

In Germany most internet connection have a clause that requires regular reestablishing with get's you a new IP address. It's in the contracts because the changing IP address makes it harder to run a server behind a home connection.

The advantage of a changing IP address that it's a lot harder to track you for random websites.

It makes sense for the router to choose a time in the night where the connection isn't used to do the reconnecting. Otherwise the ISP would on it's own choose the timing which might be worse.

If your router however does this when you aren't sleeping see if disabling the feature helps.

"Channel-switching" is referring to the wireless channel. Modern wireless routers will "intelligently" select a wireless channel to communicate over, taking into account features of their environment. For example, if there's high competition with other wireless transmissions on one wireless channel, they'll switch to a less contested one.

"Promoting network health" is a bit of a nebulous thing to say about a home network served by a single router. As a pragmatic observation, rebooting a router can solve a variety of problems it might be experiencing. Most home users can't distinguish local machine problems from problems with the network, and automatic periodic rebooting of the router probably prevents a lot of support calls. If you're happy with rebooting your own router as and when you see fit, I don't see why you shouldn't turn this feature off.

The path I see is to develop more specific preferences and articulate why you prefer certain clothing over other clothing. Tell your relatives what kind of clothing you like.

You can even say: "I have make a decision to move to a new style ..." If you don't want to make them feel bad for past gifts.

Clothes I pick often depend on my mood and the social context I will have in the day. If the emotional state in which you buy radically differs from the state in which you choose clothes from your wardrobe that can lead to a disconnect.

Have you analysed why you prefer certain clothing over other clothing?

If N2 basically has to pay a tax towards money being challenged through N2 after the node is in use for a while, why doesn't it instead create a N3 node to use as a conductor for payments?

I'm not sure I've correctly understood your question, but it's hard to see how anything much like that could follow from Bayes' theorem on its own.

I mean people are still buying the sugared version of Coke not the Zero, right?

It's not a straightforward case:

In one study, published in 2008 in the journal "Obesity," researchers studied more than 5,000 participants for up to eight years and found that the waistlines of people who drank diet soft drinks increased 70 percent more than people who didn't drink diet soda.

It should really depend on what is to be replaced. It's difficult to think of examples otherwise. Maybe, make yourself a special cup of tea - like, it is five o'clock, I shall drink this my very favourite cup of tea with lemon and 1 1/5 lumps of sugar on my balcony, and count the day as a win?:)

I mean people are still buying the sugared version of Coke not the Zero, right?

Not sure that artificial sweeteners are ok for humans. Specifically, at least one of my family members is allergic to aspartame (sp?), so I tend to consider the stuff more dangerous than sugar, which I at least know I can metabolize with fairly predictable effects.