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I think a reasonable-seeming metric on which humans are doubtless the winners is "energy controlled".
Total up all the human metabolic energy, plus the output of the world's power grids, the energy of all that petrol/gas burning in cars/boilers. If you are feeling generous you could give humans a percentage of all the metabolic energy going through farm animals.
Its a bit weird, because on the one hand its obvious that collectively humans control the planet in a way no other organism does. But, you are looking for a metric where plants and single-celled organisms are allowed to participate, and they can't properly be said to control anything, even themselves.
I think this question is maybe logically flawed.
Say I have a shuffled deck of cards. You say the probability that the top card is the Ace of Spades is 1/52. I show you the top card, it is the 5 of diamonds. I then ask, knowing what you know now, what probability you should have given.
I picked a card analogy, and you picked a dice one. I think the card one is better in this case, for weird idiosyncratic reasons I give below that might just be irrelevant to the train of thought you are on.
Cards vs Dice: If we could reset the whole planet to its exact state 1 week before the election then we would I think get the same result (I don't think quantum will mess with us in one week). What if we do a coarser grained reset? So if there was a kettle of water at 90 degrees a week before the election that kettle is reset to contain the same volume of water in the same part of my kitchen, and the water is still 90 degrees, but the individual water molecules have different momenta. For some value of "macro" the world is reset to the same macrostate but not the same microstate, it had 1 week before election day. If we imagine this experiment I still think Trump wins every (or almost every) time, given what we know now. For me to think this kind of thermal-level randomness made a difference in one week it would have to have been much closer.
In my head things that change on the coarse-grained reset feel more like unrolled dice, and things that don't more like facedown cards. Although in detail the distinction is fuzzy: it is based on an arbitrary line between micro an macro, and it is time sensitive, because cards that are going to be shuffled in the future are in the same category as dice.
EDIT: I did as asked, and replied without reading your comments on the EA forum. Reading that I think we are actually in complete agreement, although you actually know the proper terms for the things I gestured at.
This idea (without the name) is very relevant in First Aid training.
For example, if you learn CPR from some organisations they will teach you compressions-only CPR, while others will also teach you to do the breaths. I have heard it claimed by first aid teachers that the reason for this is because doing the best possible CPR requires the breaths, but that someone who learned CPR one afternoon over a year ago and hasn't practiced since is unlikely to do effective breaths, and that person would be better of keeping to compressions only.
In First Aid books a common attempt to solve this problem is to give sweeping commands at the beginning (often with the word "never" somewhat abused), and then give specific exceptions later. The aim is that if you will remember one thing it will hopefully be the blanket rule, not the specific exception. I think that method probably has something to recommend for it, its hard to imagine how you could remember the exception without remembering the rule it is an exception too.
[For example the Life Support book, tells you 'never' to give anyone medicine or drugs, as you are a First Aider, not a Doctor. It also tells you to give aspirin to someone having a heart attack if they have not taken any other drugs. I think it also recommends antihistamines for swelling insect stings.]
I find that surprising, given that so much of your writing feels kind of crisp and minimalist. Short punchy sentences. If that is how you think your mind is very unlike mine.
Much as I liked the book I think its not a good recomendation for an 11 year old. There are definitely maths-y 11 year olds who would really enjoy the subject matter once they get into it. (Stuff about formal systems and so on). But if we gave GEB to such an 11 year old I think the dozens of pages at the beginning on the history of music and Bach running around getting donations would repel most of them. (Urgh, mum tricked me into reading about classical music).
I am all for giving young people a challenge, but I think GEB is challenging on too many different fronts all at once. Its loooong. Its written somewhat in academic-ese. And the subject matter is advanced. So any 11 year old who could deal with one of that trinity also has to face the other two.
Yes, you could fix it by making the portal pay for lifting. An alternative fix would be to let gravity go through portals, so the ball feels the Earth's gravity by the direct route and also through the portal. Which I think makes the column between the two portals zero G, with gravity returning towards normal as you move radially. This solution only deals with the steady-state though, at the moment portals appear or disappear the gravitational potential energy of objects (especially those near the portal) would step abruptly.
Its quite a fun situation to think about.
“If I’m thinking about what someone else might do and feel in situation X by analogy to what I might do and feel in situation X, and then if situation X is unpleasant than that simulation will be unpleasant, and I’ll get a generally unpleasant feeling by doing that.”
I think this is definitely true. Although, sometimes people solve that problem by just not thinking about what the other person is feeling. If the other person has ~no power, so that failing to simulate them carries ~no costs, then this option is ~free.
This kind of thing might form some kind of an explanation for Stockholm Syndrome. If you are kidnapped, and your survival potentially depends on your ability to model your kidnapper's motivations, and you have nothing else to think about all day, then any overspill from that simulating will be maximised. (Although from the wikipedia article on Stockholm syndrome it looks like it is somewhat mythical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome)
I agree that its super unlikely to make any difference, if the LLM player is consistently building pylons in order to build assimilators that is a weakness at every level of slowdown so has little or no implications for your results.
An interesting project. One small detail that confuses me. In the first log is the entry:
"Action failed: BUILD ASSIMILATOR, Reason: No Pylon available"But, in SC2 you don't need a pylon to build an assimilator. Perhaps something in the interface with the LLM is confused because most protos buildings do need a pylon and the exception is no accounted for correctly?
I am sure that being cited by wikipeida is very good for giving an article more exposure. There is an "altimetric" thingy on some journals that is used to help funders see what other useful impacts an article had on the world beyond citations from other articles, and it thinks wikipedia mentions are high-value (it also likes things like newspaper coverage).
I suspect that it is not that rare for the authors of a paper to go and put a link in wiki to their own paper. I have certainly seen wiki articles mention something with a cite, which, while true, feels weirdly specific.
Thank you very much, that sounds like a fascinating wider discussion. Personally, I suspect the Abraham-Minkowski question is only unusual in the sense that it is a known unknown. I think the unknown unknowns are probably much larger in scope. Although it is probably quite dependent on where exactly you draw the physics/engineering boundary.
In my post the way I cited Lubos Motl's comment implicitly rounded it off to "Minkowski is just right" (option [6]), which is indeed his headline and emphasis. But if we are zooming in on him I should admit that his full position is a little more nuanced. My understanding is that he makes 3 points:
(1) - Option [1] is correct. (Abraham gives kinetic momentum, Minkowski the canonical momentum)
(2) - In his opinion the kinetic momentum is pointless and gross, and that true physics only concerns itself with the canonical momentum.
(3) - As a result of the kinetic momentum being worthless its basically correct to say Minkowski was "just right"(option [6]). This means that the paper proposing option [1] was a waste of time (much ado about nothing), because the difference between believing [1] and believing [6] only matters when doing kinetics, which he doesn't care about. Finally, having decided that Minkowski was correct in the only way that he thinks matters, he goes off into a nasty side-thing about how Abraham was supposedly incompetent.
So his actual position is sort of [1] and [6] at the same time (because he considers the difference between them inconsequential, as it only applies to kinetics). If he leans more on the [1] side he can consider 12.72 to be valid. But why would he bother? 12.72 is saying something about kinetics, it might as well be invalid. He doesn't care either way.
He goes on to explicitly say that he thinks 12.72 is invalid. Although I think his logic on this is flawed. He says the glass block breaks the symmetry, which is true for the photon. However, the composite system (photon + glass block) still has translation and boost symmetry, and it is the uniform motion of the center of mass of the composite system that is at stake.
Yes, you are certainly right it is a quasiparticle. People often use the word polariton to name it (eg https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666032620300363#bib1 ).
I think you might have muddled the numbering? It looks like you have written an argument in favor of either [2] or [3] (which both hold that the momentum of the full polariton is larger than the momentum of the photonic part alone - in the cartoon of the original post whether or not the momentum "in the water" is included), then committed to [1] instead at the end. This may be my fault, as the order I numbered the arguments in the summary at the end of the post didn't match the order they were introduced, and [2] was the first introduced. (In hindsight this was probably a bad way to structure the post, sorry about that!)
" "passing by atoms and plucking them" is a lie to children " - I personally dislike this kind of language. There is nothing wrong with having mental images that help you understand what is going on. If/when those images need to be discarded then I don't think belittling them or the people who use them is helpful. In this case the "plucking" image shows that at any one time some of the excitation is in the material, which is the same thing you conclude.
[In this case I think the image is acceptably rigorous anyway, but lets not litigate that because which mental images are and are not compatible with a quantum process is a never ending rabbit hole.]
Thank you very much for reading and for your thoughts. If I am correct about the numbering muddle it is good to see more fellow [2/3]'ers.
I presented the redshift calculation in terms of a single photon, but actually, the exact same derivation goes through unchanged if you replace every instance of with and with . Where and are the energy of a light pulse before and after it enters the glass. There is no need to specify whether the light pulse is a single photon a big flash of classical light or anything else.
Something linear in the distance travelled would not be a cumulatively increasing red shift, but instead an increasing loss of amplitude (essentially a higher cumulative probability of being absorbed). This is represented using a complex valued refractive index (or dielectric constant) where the real part is how much the wave slows down and the imaginary part is how much it attenuates per distance. There is no reason in principle why the losses cannot be arbitrarily close to zero at the wavelength we are using. (Interestingly, the losses have to be nonzero at some wavelength due to something called the Kramers Kronig relation, but we can assume they are negligible at our wavelength).
I think the point about angular momentum is a very good way of gesturing at how its possibly different. Angular momentum is conserved, but an isolated system can still rotate itself, by spinning up and then stopping a flywheel (moving the "center of rotation").
Thank for finding that book and screenshot. Equation 12.72 is directly claiming that momentum is proportional to energy flow (and in the same direction). I am very curious how that intersects with claims common in metamaterials (https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.75.053810 ) that the two can flow in opposite directions.
"And then conservation of momentum implies uniform motion of the center of mass, right?" - This is the step I am less than 100% on. Certainly it does for a collection of billiard balls. But, as soon as light is included things get less clear to me. It has momentum, but no inertial mass. Plus, as an admittedly weird example, the computer game "portal" has conservation or momentum, but not uniform motion of the centre of mass. Which means at the very least the two can logically decouple.
I consider momentum conservation a "big principle.", and Newtons 3 laws indeed set out momentum conservation. However, I believe uniform centre of mass motion to be an importantly distinct principle. The drive loop thing would conserve momentum even if it were possible. Indeed momentum conservation is the principle underpinning the assumed reaction forces that make it work in the first place. To take a different example, if you had a pair of portals (like from the game "portal") on board your spaceship, and ran a train between them, you could drive the train backwards, propelling your ship forwards, and thereby move while conserving total momentum, only to later put the train's breaks on and stop. I am not asking you to believe in portals, I am just trying to motivate that weird hypotheticals can be cooked up where the principle of momentum conservation decouples from the principle of uniform centre of mass motion. The two are distinct principles.
Abraham supporters do indeed think you can use conservation of momentum to work out which way the glass block moves in that thought experiment, showing that (because the photon momentum goes down) the block must move to the right. Minkowksi supporters also think you can use conservation of momentum to work out how the glass block moves, but because they think the photon momentum goes up the block must move to the left. The thing that is at issue is the question of what expression to use to calculate the momentum, both sides agree that whatever the momentum is it is conserved. As a side point, a photon has nonzero momentum in all reference frames, and that is not an aspect of relativity that is sensibly ignored.
You are actually correct that the photon does have to red-shift very slightly as it enters the glass block. If the glass was initially at rest, then after the photon has entered the photon has either gained or lost momentum (depending on Abraham or Minkowski), in either case imparting the momentum difference onto the glass block. The kinetic energy of the glass block is given by where p is the momentum the block has gained, and m is the block's mass. The photon's new frequency is then given by (by conservation of energy) where was its initial frequency. In practice a glass block will have a very gigantic mass compared to , but at least in principle the photon does red shift.
Going into the full gory detail for Abraham.
Abraham:
Photon momentum before entering glass
Photon momentum after entering glass (note, new frequency , not the old one)
Change in photon momentum
The same momentum goes into the glass, so
We can re-arrange to put the c^2 in the denominator next to the mass of the glass block. So that the change in the frequency/energy of the photon is scaled by a term that has something to do with the refractive index, along with how the photon energy compares to the rest mass energy of the glass block (). So, as previously said, this is negligible for a glass block that weighs any reasonable amount.
The Minkowski version is almost the same derivation, except the division by refractive index becomes a multiplication, giving:
Playing with these quadratic equations, to solve for , you find that the Abraham version never breaks. In contrast, if you assume it is possible to have a glass block with a reasonably high refractive index, but arbitrarily small mass, then Minkowski eventually breaks and starts giving an imaginary frequency. This maybe says something vaguely negative about Minkowski, but a block of material with a high refractive index but negligible mass is such an unrealistic setup that I don't think failing in that case is too embarrassing for the Minkowski equation.
My thoughts on this are not going to be fully coherent, because I am in the process of possibly changing my mind.
I agree that if we take the uniform motion of centre of mass as an absolute principle then the weird light-in-circles machine does not work. However, I had never before encountered this principle, and (to me) it still carries the "I learned about this last week, how much do I trust it?" penalty. But, even accepting it, that doesn't explain why the machine fails. Does it remain the case that the actual mechanical momentum and energy transport directions are opposite in the right metamaterial (as claimed in, for example: https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.75.053810 ), but the machine fails for some other reason (eg. recoils on the interfaces)? Showing the machine to be impossible while leaving this unanswered doesn't get to the roots of my various related confusions, I still don't know whether energy flow and momentum can 'really' point opposite directions, or whether it's all just an accounting trick.
The uniform motion of centre of mass implies other things. For example, it means anything like a portal from the game "portal" is impossible as the centre of mass would change discontinuously as something went through the portal. [We can even "re-skin" of the photon loop by instead having a train with portals, so it can keep reusing the same track on our space ship repeatedly].
Numbering the options properly is a good idea, done.
To answer your points:
- This is interesting. Symmetry under rotations gives us conservation of angular momentum. Symmetry under translations conservation of linear momentum. You are saying symmetry under boosts gives conservation of centre of mass velocity. Although in "normal" situations (billiard balls colliding) conservation of centre of mass velocity is a special case of as conservation of linear momentum - which I suppose is why I have not heard of it before. I need to look at this more as I find I am still confused. Intuitively I feel like if translation symmetry is doing momentum for us boost symmetry should relate to a quantity with an extra time-derivative in it somewhere.
There is no symmetry under angular boosts, which I imagine is why fly-wheels (or gyroscopes) allow for an "internal reaction drive" for angular velocity. - I did not know that the kinetic and canonical momentum had different values in other fields. That makes option (1) more believable.
- Yes, the k-vector (wavevector) certainly extends by a factor of . So if you want your definition of "momentum" to be linear in wavevector then you are stuck with Minkowski.
I believe, that at the interface between the water and the air we will have a partial reflection of the light. The reflected component of the light has an evanescent tail associated with it that tunnels into the air gap. If we had more water on the other side of the air gap then the evanescent tail would be converted back into a propagating wave, and the light would not reflect from the first water interface in the first place. As the evanescent tail has a length of the order of a wavelength this means that random gaps between the atoms in water or glass don't mess with the propagating light wave, as the wavelength is so much longer than those tiny gaps they do not contribute.
Applying this picture to your question, I think we would expect to interpolate smoothly between the two momentum values as the air gap size was changed, with the interpolation function an exponential with decay distance equal to the length of our evanescent wave.
Thanks for reading. Enjoy your option (1)!
This is very interesting, thank you for sharing it.
I find the 5 day limits (without approval) quite insane. Even assuming that means 5 actual days (and not 20% of 5 days = 1 full day). Lets say you have an employee who has now put 5 days into their preferred passion project. You end it. They then put 5 says into their second-favourite passion project. The end result is an annoyed employee who has half-finished a train of side-projects and is still putting 20% of their time to one side from core duties.
My current work (university) is thankfully very flexible, so maybe I am seeing things from the wrong perspective.
I agree with this.
In my very limited experience (which is mostly board games with some social situations thrown in), attempts to obscure publically discernible information to influence other people's actions are often extremely counter-productive. If you don't give people the full picture, then the most likely case is not that they discover nothing, but that they discover half the picture. And you don't know in advance which half. This makes them extremely unpredictable. You want them to pick A in preference to B, but the half-picture they get drives them to pick C which is massively worse for everyone.
In board games I have played, if a slightly prisoner's dilemma like situation arises, you are much more likely to get stung by someone who has either misunderstood the rules or has misunderstood the equilibrium than someone who knows what is going on. [As a concrete example, in the game Scyth a new player believed that they got mission completion points for each military victory, not just the first one. As they had already scored a victory another played reasoned they wouldn't make a pointless attack. But they did make the pointless attack. It set them and their target back, giving the two players not involved in that battle a relative advantage.]
“The best swordsman does not fear the second best, he fears the worst since there’s no telling what that idiot is going to do.” [https://freakonomics.com/2011/10/rules-of-the-game/#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThe%20best%20swordsman%20does%20not,can%20beat%20smartness%20and%20foresight%3F]
This best swordsman wants more people to know how to sword fight, not fewer.
I very good point. Especially after reading your other comment I wonder if this is deliberate.
The payoff matrix for the generals suggests that in a one-way attack the winning generals win more than the losers loose. Hence your coin toss plan. But, for the civilians it is the other way around. (+25 for winning, but -50 for loosing).
I suspect it may be some kind of message about how the generals launching the nuclear war have different incentives to the civilians, as the generals may place a higher value on victory, and are more likely to access bunkers and so on.
I have no idea what the event will be, but Petrov Day itself is the 26th of September, and given that LW users are in many timezones my expectation is that there will be no specific time you need to be available on that day.
I don't know how the survey was done, but one silver lining is that if the respondents were asked those questions in the same order they are shown then the last question was given last in that set. So the people being surveyed are to some extent being "brought towards it" by the preceding questions. See this Yes Minister clip (although the survey above is much less dramatic example, and they published all the questions, so they are being legitimate):
You could probably cook up a set of preceding questions that would have delivered the opposite result. Something like: "Do you think Germans in WW2 should have resisted/criticised their government more?", following with questions about a non-specific country's people criticising its government during a non-specific war, then going to that final question.
Thanks for the great article. I think that the idea of asking "how many re-uses does this thing give before wearing out" is a great way of focusing the mind away from the super fancy materials. I love the idea of all these spaceships doing a "strip the willow" type dance with one another.
In terms of dropping things from orbit to re-spool your tethers. One component of that might be old/redundant/broken satellites. Its kind of like fuel recycling, the fuel that went into accelerating a satellite 20 years ago can be re-extracted (at some efficiency) by transferring that kinetic energy to something new that is not obsolete.
To me the more natural reading is "probably looses North Caroliner (57%)".
57% being the chance that she "looses North Caroliner". Where as, as it is, you say "looses NC" but give the probabiltiy that she wins it. Which for me takes an extra scan to parse.
I might be misunderstanding your point. My opinion is that software brains are extremely difficult (possibly impossibly difficult) because brains are complicated. Your position, as I understand it, is that they are extremely difficult (possibly impossibly difficult) because brains are chaotic.
If its the former (complexity) then there exists a sufficiently advanced model of the human brain that can work (where "sufficiently advanced" here means "probably always science fiction"). If brains are assumed to be chaotic then a lot of what people think and do is random, and the simulated brains will necessarily end up with a different random seed due to measurement errors. This would be important in some brain simulating contexts, for example it would make predicting someone's future behaviour based on a simulation of their brain impossible. (Omega from Newcomb's paradox would struggle to predict whether people would two-box or not.) However, from the point of view of chasing immortality for yourself or a loved one the chaos doesn't seem to be an immediate problem. If my decision to one-box was fundamentally random (down to thermal fluctuations) and trivial changes on the day could have changed my mind, then it couldn't have been part of my personality. My point was, from the immortality point of view, we only really care about preserving the signal, and can accept different noise.
My position is that either (1) my brain is computationally stable, in the sense that what I think, how I think it and what I decide to do after thinking is fundamentally about my algorithm (personality/mind), and that tiny changes in the conditions (a random thermal fluctuation), are usually not important. Alternatively (2) my brain is not a reliable/robust machine, and my behaviour is very sensitive to the random thermal fluctuations of atoms in my brain.
In the first case, we wouldn't expect small errors (for some value of small) in the uploaded brain to result in significant divergence from the real person (stability). In the second case I am left wondering why I would particularly care. Are the random thermal fluctuations pushing me around somehow better than the equally random measurement errors pushing my soft-copy around?
So, I don't think uploaded brains can be ruled out a priori on precision grounds. There exists a non-infinite amount of precision that suffices, the necessary precision is upper bounded by the thermal randomness in a body temperature brain.
Oh, Thrawn is a Navi. I somehow got it into my head on first pass that he was an Ewok. Its going to take time to shift that mental image of him.
Dantoine was where she said in the film I think.
Really interesting. Thank you for trying it out. It matches the original post far more closely than it does my theory. (It goes all in on "mystic" instead of going all in on "conclusions".)
So that strongly suggests my proposed explanation is wrong in some important way(s).
I think that what is going on is roughly something like this. People know that "Gambling is bad.", it can lead to addiction, and people who engage heavily with lots of gambling can mess up their lives.
So, a useful heuristic is "don't gamble", which is probably what most young people are either explicitly or implicitly told as children. So, the first experiment is really measuring whether $5 in expected winnings is enough to overcome people's trained aversion to casinos and gambling. You may as well be offering them $5 in exchange for trying a cigarette, I think that is the close analogy. By accepting this bet they are adopting a policy which says that sometimes gambling is OK, and they recognise that this policy is potentially dangerous, and that changing a general life policy, with all the due diligence that should rightly be afforded to that, is worth less than an expected $5.
When they see the second bet the potential winnings are so huge that it swamps that. Even if they value the general heuristic at $1000 they still take the bet. And besides this is such an outlier of a bet that is doesn't have to imply a general change in policy. And if they win they are not exactly going to need to ever gamble again anyway.
If I am right there are probably ways of re-structuring the game that would make it look less like gambling, and those tricks would significantly change people's behaviour.
I think an intuitive idea of (what I think) GDP is supposed to be capturing is this. Imagine that suddenly we have two copies of the world, taken from two different times, that are able to trade. So you could offer a 1960's person a 2024 smartphone for their house. (They wouldn't take it, you would be outbid by another 2024-er offering TWO smartphones, plus a laptop). You then work out how much richer the 2024 world is in that shared market.
Interestingly, we can sort of trade between different times. By storing things to sell later. And this possibility kind of undermines the loop example you give. If I know that a price loop like that is taking place I can make a lot of money by buying things on the lows, and re-selling them on the highs. (I buy good A in year 2, sell in year 3. I buy B in year 4, sell in year 5). But, me doing this off course smooths out the bumps and undermines the GDP hack. So you would have to use a perishable good, or a service, if you wanted to do your Escher staircase GPD scheme.
Another way too boost GDP growth. Make more transactions monetary.
There are people who take care of their own children. This disastrously inefficient. If they got a job as a babysitter then they would be able to afford a babysitter for their own kids. The GDP figures would see two new babysitting jobs appear, with measurable economic value in terms of $ per year. Free growth.
We should encourage the following arrangement: People AB are a married couple. First, A buys a house. Next, B rents the house from them. Finally, B sub-lets A a spare room in the house. Now, as far as GDP is concerned the rent being paid on the house (and the spare room) is adding to the economy, in a way that it would not if AB were just living together in A's house. In the UK, the government has decided that rather than force everyone to make agreements like this they will just be assumed in the GDP numbers by supposing every home owner is renting their home from themselves (https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/02/14/10-or-gdp-is-made-up-it-simply-does-not-exist-in-the-real-world/) which is more efficient than actually doing the procedure.
I don't know why they haven't done it with babysitting yet. Its easy, estimate the total number of children in the country. Assume they need taking care of 24 hours a day up to some age, and then fewer hours per day as they age. Multiply the total number of care hours by the wage of a babysitter. Multiply by a factor (maybe 1.25?) reflecting that parental care can be assumed slightly higher value. Add it to GDP. This will overcount slightly, as you need to subtract the hours already done by babysitters/nurseries. But that can be fixed either by subtracting it off or even by just making them illegal.
My guess is that you just don't have any conditionals, but work them out from other markets.
Eg. One market on "Harris wins with X on the ticket", one on "Harris looses with X on the ticket", "Harris chooses X for VP" and so on. Then the chances of her winning, conditional on different candidates, can be worked out by comparing how these markets are doing.
The "universal" part of UBI is an important difference. If you print money to give to only one person then that won't be inflationary, but the more beneficiaries there are the more inflation will cut into the gains they each individually experience. So unemployment benefit, by hitting a smaller number of people, has less of this.
I think it is plausible that introducing UBI would make certain goods go up in price. For example rents right at the bottom of the market might go up (because landlords know the tenants can pay it), but they might go down at the top (due to the raised taxes cutting into rent budgets of the rich). That would feel exactly the same as inflation to the people effected, although I suppose technically it would not be inflation if the hit at the top balanced it on average. This would increase the supply of "poor person" goods, because the poor can afford more of them, so more will be manufactured.
(Inflation is a weird one because every person experiences a different inflation rate, depending on how the prices of the goods they buy are changing. The headline rate is some kind of average, which for many people might not be very close to their reality.)
I certainly see where you are coming from.
One thing that might be cofounding it slightly is that (depending on the target) the reward for actually taking home targets might not be LW karma but something real. So the "I have the head" only gives 40 karma. But the "head" might well also be worth something in the real world, like if its some AI code toy example that does something cool it might lead to a new job. Or if its something more esoteric like "meditation technique improves performance at work" then you get the performance boost.
In fairness, I think some Psychology is reasonably theory supported.
For example, there is that famous study where the economist added extra "decoy" options of ways to subscribe (https://thestrategystory.com/2020/10/02/economist-magazine-a-story-of-clever-decoy-pricing/), which apparently helped a lot. I have read about related studies following this idea where they got pictures of people, asked other people to pick the most attractive from a bunch, and found that decoy effects played a part in a similar way. If you take it as a theory that people are bad at comparing options objectively, and can be swayed into taking one option by being offered a strictly-worse alternative then you would be able to make all kinds of predictions, in various different contexts and studies, that you could maybe carry across.
However, I do have a lot of sympathy for your general position. A simple theory that is mostly-right is gold, a staggering textbook of complexity that is 100% right is just overfitting. Economics has a lot of the former, psychology more of the latter.
For me, I felt like publishing in scientific journals required me to be dishonest.
...what?
I can't speak to what the OP meant by that. But scientific publishing does require spin, at least if you are aiming for a good journal. There is not some magic axis by which people care about some things and not about others, so its your job as an author to persuade people to care about your results. This shifts the dial in all sorts of little ways.
"Well, in the end it seems like we learned nothing." If that is the conclusion you don't get to publish the paper, which is not good for your career. Where-as "In conclusion, we have shown {really important result} beyond any shadow of a doubt" is good. But real results are in the middle. You have something, but there are caveats, assumptions, details that you don't think are important but who knows maybe they are? On any particular weakness, how much emphasis does it get? A paragraph? A sentence? A footnote? In the supplementary information? Entirely missing? How much emphasis would you give that weakness in your methodology if the publishing process was not incentivising you to put it as far down that list as possible?
The manufacturing process was not reliable, but the 32nd device tested worked fairly well, as plotted in fig.3.
"Why mention the 31 devices that the paper is not about?"
Assumption 1, assumption 2....
"Its nice that you understand and explain these assumptions so well. But they are all pretty standard in the field. I think we can drop these paragraphs, just say "using standard approximations", actually "standard methods" sounds better."
The end result:
PhD student's draft: "It is possible that quantum information technology might be important at some point in the future. One aspect of that is 2-bit operations, but they need to be robust. One particular 2 bit operation is the CNOT gate. In this paper we demonstrate a CNOT quantum gate, that only worked on the 32nd tested device. Its nowhere near good enough for a useful quantum computer, but it worked OK on Tuesday, which is something (when I returned to get more data on Wednesday it had permanently stopped working for inexplicable reasons.)."
Final (published) paper after the professor has had an edit: "Quantum technology will soon revolutionise all aspects of human society, bringing vast social and economic benefits. The key obstacle to realising these enormous gains is a reliable the 2-bit quantum gate. In this paper we propose a novel design for such a gate, and find that a high level of reliability can be achieved simultaneously with improving the device's speed."
Tax codes change in small ways the whole time without much warning. So the idea of a giant taxation shift taking place over 30 or 40 years doesn't seem ridiculous to me. For historical comparison I found this graph on UK income tax. Income tax was 0% up until 1909. Then it increased to over 90% in the next 32 years. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:UK_top_income_tax_and_inequality.png
yes, the world wars obviously had a lot to do with it. But if it had instead gone from 0% to 25% that would still have been a huge shift.
The world can change fast, and all changes have winners and loosers, so I am not sure this is the right place to attack Georgism.
Very interesting. Thank you for sharing this theory.
I had two thoughts. The first is: "Doesn't radiation cause cancer? Isn't this effect well established with evidence?". Because if radiation does cause cancer then that is strong evidence that the DNA theory is true of at least some cancers. (Because radiation cannot spread a fungus).
My second thought (which I agree is in some tension with the radiation one), is that, even if I subscribe to a DNA theory of cancer, I don't have to imagine that every tumour has a mutation (relative to the rest of the organism), or that tumour cells are unable to produce healthy embryos without a cancer. To use a software analogy, lets imagine we have a piece of software with a bug. We have all played a computer game where things are basically fine but there is that one time you ended up halfway inside a wall because of some collision error thing. You never worked out quite what did it that time, but the game was usually fine.
When a piece of software shows that collision bug, we don't need to assume that a cosmic ray has flipped a bit in the software. We can check that the code is the same before and after we saw the collision error. This doesn't mean we are going to see collision errors every single time we play that computer game, it just means that the game has a bug that can appear in some limited situations. Similarly, I can imagine that many organisms contain "bugs" in their DNA (the DNA they were born with, undamaged) and that some of these bugs only express themselves rarely, when specific circumstances arise, and sometimes the result of the "glitch" is cancer. In this model the tumours are not mutated. This model is consistent with the idea that radiation and so on can make cancer more likely, as flipping a bunch of bits in a piece of software is much more likely to introduce more bugs than to reduce the number. But it also seems consistent with some tumours being genetically identical to the rest of the organism. The main prediction of this sort of model would be a strong inherited tendency for certain cancers, especially for identical twins.
As a final thought. If the fungus theory is correct, it doesn't seem like it would be impossibly hard for someone to find some of the fungus cells in mouse A. Look at them under a microscope, "Yes, fungus all right." and then use them to give cancer to a bunch of other mice. So the fungus theory (unlike my speculations above) has the great advantage of seeming to be very testable.
Yes, I like the "add more doors" way of explaining it.
If you add enough doors you don't even need to finish the first run to make people see. Say there are 100 doors "Player: I pick door 99". "Judge: Ok, well I can reveal that door 1 is empty. And door 2. Door 3. 4, ....24, 25, 26, 28 (cough), 29, 30, 31..."
A very clever answer. Although I worry it might not actually carry through. My understanding is that chiral molecules react differently with other chrial molecules. So that if molecules A and B react to give C then the mirror of A reacts with the mirror of B to give the mirror of C.
So the clone might be immune to snake venom (yay!), but all kinds of everyday foods might effect them as if they were snake venom (boo!). But if the clone has (behind them) a whole mirror-world ecosystem then I think they are OK.
There is some particle physics stuff that is believed to break this symmetry intrinsically, without needing another Chiral thing to react with. [I find this really hard to believe, but apparently it is so]. So I suppose over a very long timescale some of those obscure particle interactions might break the symmetry.
Even within universities there is a constant battle between providing students with good chances to learn, and providing them with fair assessment criteria.
The lab experiments in physics courses are a good example of this. Everyone knows the students learn the most, and have the most fun when you tell them what they need to measure, and leave it up to them how they are going to measure it. Then leave it to them to decide which follow-up questions they want to ask ask and how they want to pursue those. However, a minority of students sometimes complain , especially if they feel their assessments were not fair. The university hates student complaints, and likes having ammunition to shoot them down by showing that everything was equal for everyone: which usually means a lot of structure in the marking, which in turn imposes structure on what the students can do (reducing freedom).
Obviously I prefer to lean towards more freeform than my institution, but I wouldn't go "the whole way". The bits of paper students get at the end are actually important for their future lives (unfortunately they may be more important than the stuff they learn). Having the genius who does an experiment in a very novel and weird way get a failing grade because the assessor doesn't understand what they have done is the cost you pay for going too free-form. The reward is that they did the experiment in a very novel and weird way, so probably had fun and learned a lot.
Confusion slain!
I forgot that their were leftover chips rewarded to the player with the most goal suit cards (I now remember seeing that in the rules, but wrote it off as a way of fixing the fact that the number of goal suit cards and players could both vary so their would be rounding errors, and didn't keep it in mind). That achieves the same kind of thing I was gesturing at (most of a suit), but much more elegantly.
Thank you for clarifying that.
Something that confuses me a bit about Figgie, is that not only is it a zero-sum game (which is fine), but every individual exchange is also zero-sum (which seems not fine). If I imagine a group of 4 people playing it, and two of them just say "I won't do any trading at all, just take my dealt hand (without looking at it) to the end of the round", and the other two players engage in trade, then (on average) the score of the two trading players will be the same as those of the two players who don't trade. This, seems like its a problem. If your assessment is that the other players are more skilled than you, then it is optimal to just not engage.
I haven't played it, so this idea might be very silly, but it feels like the scoring should be rewarding players who have made their hand very strongly contain one particular suit (even if its not the goal suit). Then in the example above the two players engaging in trade can help one another to end up with lopsided hands (eg. one has lots of hearts, the other lots of spades), so that the group that trades has a relative advantage over a group that doesn't.
As a candidate rule it would be something like: At round end every spade you have makes you pay 1 chip out to the person with the most spades (for all suits except the goal suit).
As an insight into the power of Wikipedia. When I first found lesswrong when googling something I read a couple of articles, thought "this seems good, if a bit weird", and then read its Wikipedia page before going any further.
At the time my view (which I remember saying to a friend who was looking up the website after I recommended an article) was "Its mostly right, but fixates a weird amount on the basilisk thing".
It certainly works. Another friend of mine recently opinionated "everyone on LW is an idiot, because basilisk thing", which was interesting because I didn't know that friend knew about LW at all, and from the basilisk thing mentioned it seemed likely they had just read its Wikipedia. (To them, the argument is not "All users of this website are idiots because I think one topic discussed on it once was dumb". But instead "All users of this website are idiots because the one thing the website apparently discusses seems dumb". Its important that the basilisk on wiki's LW article was not one thing out of 10 or 20. But the single one thing.)
I am here because the Wikipedia page didn't put me off reading LW.
We expect heat to flow from hot to cold, devices that deviate from this are thermodynamically unlikely, which is another way of saying that they require a low entropy source. (As you said.) Low entropy = thermodynamically unlikely. This means that heat pumps are extremely non-random. So any system that looks like its random (a hot cup of tea) is going to be a very bad candidate. Similarly I think that things like weather phenomena are a bad place to look.
Living creatures can do thermodynamically unlikely things. As an example lots of (all?) individual cells move various chemicals (like salt) against the density gradients (so they move salt from a place of low concentration to a place of high salt concentration). This is Active Transport. This is just as thermodynamically unlikely as a heat pump, but its a "salt pump" not a "heat pump" so its not exactly right.
My feeling is that an actual "heat pump" (with heat, not salt) must occur in some organisms, and I think I have found a borderline example at this link (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3962001/#:~:text=After%20getting%20hot%20enough%20the,the%20nest%20surface%2015%2C%2046.) :
"In the spring ants are observed to create clusters on the mound surface as they bask in the sun. Their bodies contain a substantial amount of water which has high thermal capacity making ant bodies an ideal medium for heat transfer. After getting hot enough the ants move inside the nest where the accumulated heat is released."
If we suppose that, as a result of this, the inside of the ant's nest ends up warmer than the air outside then this I think possibly counts. Its a heat pump where the working fluid is living ants. The cold ones leave to bask in the sun, then return hot.
Its borderline because there is cheating going on, in that the sun is much hotter than the inside of the ant's nest (I assume), and they are using the sun to heat themselves up. Ideally we need ants that carry around little compressible air sacks they can inflate inside and deflate outside, so that they can unambiguously take heat from the cool air outside to deposit in the hot air inside their nest.
I think the best model for "why ban fresh bread" is something like what lexande said, but modified like this:
-People were buying fresh bread every day and (if wealthy) throwing out the bread from the day before (or throwing it out on some horizon). The idea was maybe that by preventing this use of flour (optimised for niceness) the economic forces would then optimise better for calories.
-A solidarity thing? Upping the price would disproportionately hurt the poor. Pushing the market by lowering the quality is more egalitarian in some sense. It pushes the rich into buying something more expensive, and the poor into just having worse bread.
-Bakers could optimise bread for deliciousness on the day of baking, or (somehow) make bread that was likely to last longer. Longer lasting bread would improve efficency by seeing less of it go bad.
-It was just really dumb. eg. People were arriving at the bakers to find the bread sold out. And were furious and petitioned the government to do something. The government (for some bizare reason) believed that if the sales were delayed a day that the bakeries wouldn't be out of bread when you visited (although they may be out of bread they were allowed to sell you).
This is quite similar to the "swampman" thought experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davidson_(philosopher)).
My thoughts: Assuming there is no subjective experience after death (no afterlife or anything), then it is sort of trivial that subjective experience ends at death, so you don't ever experience it.
Now, my read on your argument is that in a sufficiently big universe or multiverse, there will be many "mes" with exactly the same subjective experiences so far, and that whenever one (or a large number) of "mes" die there will be some others who are narrowly saved at the last moment, just as they wheeze their last breath an alien turns up and heals them or whatever. Or they were in a simulation the whole time or similar.
However, it remains the case that before the death there were N copies, and afterwards there were N-1. Its not like you "merged with" or "snapped into" the surviving ones. You are not causally propagating yourself into them. Its just you have accepted a world view where it is possible to likely that there are people arbitrarily similar to you.
My feeling is that its like this analogy. Imagine that in the near future all records of the works of Shakespeare (all of them, including all quotes) are lost forever. But that, it just so happens that by complete coincidence there are pebbles on a beach in another galaxy, that can be read in binary (dark/pale pebbles 1/0) to symbolise the full works of Shakespeare to the letter. Does that make it any less of a loss that the works were lost here on Earth?