Posts
Comments
I find this only a partly useful concept, since it is sometimes used to "discredit" arguments I consider quite valid, such as your last two examples. At most, if called on to defend either of those examples I would have to say more about why our usual condemnation of racism should apply to the entire category, and of why taking others' property without their consent should be condemned even when done by a group that some people consider ought to be allowed special privileges.
I would consider the genuinely self-aware systems to be real people. I suppose it's a matter of ethics (and therefore taste) whether or not that's important to you.
The obvious next question would be to ask if you're OK with your family being tortured under the various circumstances this would suggest you would be.
I've lost the context to understand this question.
How would you react to the idea of people being tortured over the cosmological horizon, outside your past or future light-cone? Or transferred to another, undetectable universe and tortured?
I mean, it's unverifiable, but strikes me as important and not at all meaningless. (But apparently I had misinterpreted you in any case.)
I don't like the idea of it happening. But if it does, I can certainly disclaim responsibility since it is by definition impossible that I can affect that situation if it exists.
The usual version of this I hear is from people who've read Minsky and/or Moravec, and feel we should treat any entity that can pass some reasonable Turing test as legally and morally human. I disagree because I believe a self-aware entity can be simulated -- maybe not perfectly, but to an arbitrarily high difficulty of disproving it -- by a program that is not self-aware. And if such a standard were enacted, interest groups would use it to manufacture a large supply of these fakes and have them vote and/or fight for their side of political questions.
Oh. That's an important distinction, yeah, but standard Singularity arguments suggest that by the time that would come up humans would no longer be making that decision anyway.
Um, if something is smart enough to solve every problem a human can, [how] relevant is the distinction? I mean, sure, it might (say) be lying about it's preferences, but ... surely it'll have exactly the same impact on society, regardless?
That appears to me to be an insoluble problem. Once intelligence (not a particular person but the quality itself) can be impersonated in quantity, how can any person or group know he/they are behaving fairly? They can't. This is another reason I'd prefer that the capability continue not to exist.
On the other hand, this sounds like a tribal battle-cry rather than a rational, non-mindkilled discussion.
It is. At some point I have trouble justifying the one without invoking the other. Some things are just so obvious to me, and so senselessly not-believed by many, that I see no peaceful way out other than dismissing those people. How do you argue with someone who isn't open to reason?
ahem ... I'm ... actually from the other tribe. Pretty heavily in favor of a Nanny Welfare State, and although I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as to say it's "obvious" and anyone who disagrees must be "senseless ... not open to reason".
Care to trade chains of logic? A welfare state, in particular, seems kind of really important from here.
I could argue about the likely consequences, but the logic chain behind my arguments is quite short and begins with postulates about individual rights that you probably don't accept.
When it comes down to it, ethics are entirely a matter of taste (though I would assert that they're a unique exception to the old saw "there's no accounting for taste" because a person's code of ethics determines whether he's trustworthy and in what ways).
I think the trouble with these sort of battle-cries is that they lead to, well, assuming the other side must be evil strawmen. It's a problem. (That's why political discussion is unofficially banned here, unless you make an effort to be super neutral and rational about it.)
One can't really have a moral code (or, I believe, self-awareness!) without using it to judge everyone and everything one sees or thinks of. This more or less demands one take the position that those who disagree are at least misguided, if not evil.
For the same reason, I never expect judges, journalists, or historians to be "unbiased" because I don't believe true "unbiasedness" is possible even in principle.
I've left most of the probability questions blank, because I don't think it is meaningfully possible to assign numbers to events I have little or no quantitative information about. For instance, I'll try P(Aliens) when we've looked at several thousand planets closely enough to be reasonably sure of answers about them.
I left them blank myself because I haven't developed the skill to do it, but the obvious other interpretation ... are you saying it's in-principle impossible to operate rationally under uncertainty?
No, I just don't think I can assign probability numbers to a guess. If forced to make a real-life decision based on such a question then I'll guess.
In addition, I don't think some of the questions can have meaningful answers. For example, the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, if true, would have no testable (falsifiable) effect on the observable universe, and therefore I consider the question to be objectively meaningless. The same goes for P(Simulation), and probably P(God).
Do you usually consider statements you don't anticipate being able to verify meaningless?
No, and I discussed that in another reply.
The obvious next question would be to ask if you're OK with your family being tortured uner the various circumstances this would suggest you would be.
I've lost the context to understand this question.
The singularity is vague, too. (And as I usually hear it described, I would see it as a catastrophe if it happened. The SF story "With Folded Hands" explains why.)
I believe I've read that story. Azimov-style robots prevent humans from interacting with the environment because they might be harmed and that would violate the First Law, right?
Yes. Eventually most human activity is banned. Any research or exploration that might make it possible for a human to get out from under the bots' rule is especially banned.
Could you go into more detail regarding how as you "usually hear it described" it would be a "catastrophe if it happened"? I can imagine a few possibilities but I'd like to be clearer on the thoughts behind this before commenting.
The usual version of this I hear is from people who've read Minsky and/or Moravec, and feel we should treat any entity that can pass some reasonable Turing test as legally and morally human. I disagree because I believe a self-aware entity can be simulated -- maybe not perfectly, but to an arbitrarily high difficulty of disproving it -- by a program that is not self-aware. And if such a standard were enacted, interest groups would use it to manufacture a large supply of these fakes and have them vote and/or fight for their side of political questions.
The stagnation is because of "progressive" politics, especially both the welfare state and overregulation/nanny-statism, which destroy most people's opportunities to innovate and profit by it.
Hmm. On the one hand, political stupidity does seem like a very serious problem that needs fixing and imposes massive opportunity costs on humanity. On the other hand, this sounds like a tribal battle-cry rather than a rational, non-mindkilled discussion.
It is. At some point I have trouble justifying the one without invoking the other. Some things are just so obvious to me, and so senselessly not-believed by many, that I see no peaceful way out other than dismissing those people. How do you argue with someone who isn't open to reason? You need the sales skill of a demagogue, which I haven't got.
Certainly the environmental movement, including its best known "scientists", have discredited themselves this way.
I don't know, I find most people don't identify such a pattern and thus avoid a BWCW effect;
What's that?
while most people above a certain standard of rationality are able to take advantage of evidence, public-spirited debunkers and patterns to screen out most of the noise. Your milage may vary, of course; I tend not to may much attention to environmental issues except when they impinge on something I'm already interested in, so perhaps this is harder at a higher volume of traffic.
One of the ways in which the demagogues have taken control of politics is to multiply political entities and the various debates, hearings, and elections they hold until no non-demagogue can hope to influence more than a vanishingly small fraction of them. This is another very common, nasty tactic that ought to have a name, although "Think globally, act locally" seems to be the slogan driving it.
"When reason fails, boobs have a chance"
Katherine Mangu-Ward in Reason
A bit of humor.
I don't buy it. We have many existing laws and spending programs that make us worse off than not having them (or, equivalently, leaving it up to the market rather than the taxpayers to provide them). The free market is known to work well enough, and broadly enough, that demanding "What would you replace it with?" when someone proposes ending one of those laws or programs is un-called-for. (If anyone really does doubt that the market will do better, the thing to do is to try it and see, not to demand proof that can't exist because the change in question hasn't been tried recently.) After a few repetitions, I simply lump the asker in with the kind of troll whose reply to every comment is "Cite?" and add him to my spam filter.
I think I see what you are trying to say, but I don't think the Boltzmann Cake Theory is comparable to Many Worlds.
In the Boltzmann Cake case, it may be impossible to physically test the theory (though I don't conclusively assume so -- there could well be some very subtle effect on the Sun's output that would facilitate such a test), but the question of fact it raises is still of objective fact.
But the truth or falsity of the Many Worlds Theory can only exist in a reference frame which spans the entire conceptual space in which the many worlds would have to coexist. And I don't believe such a frame can exist. The very fabric of logic itself requires a space-time in which to exist; without one (or extending beyond one) its very postulates become open to doubt.
I'm not sure what I could post here that would back that up: it requires some economics knowledge. I can refer you to good economics blogs such as Marginal Revolution and Cafe Hayek, or to Mises' Human Action.
It was MR that sent me here to LW in the first place.
I interpreted the two as completely disjunct. In other words anti-agathics would be drugs or treatments that prevent or repair the symptoms of aging. Some of the same tech (cell repair nanites) could potentially do both jobs, but if you have to be frozen to use the tech then I wouldn't call it anti-agathics. I guess I'm basing this usage on Blish's "They Shall Have Stars" which predicted it in the fifties.
If that's true I wish I'd known it before choosing keys.
Largest is ambiguous. It could mean longest, or largest volume (with or without counting the volume enclosed, if we're talking about the skull), or even heaviest.
Somehow this made me think of Larry Niven's "Rotating Cylinders and the Possibility of Global Causality Violation".
I wondered about that too, but for me "wiping out civilization" includes the possibility that some disaster leaves half of humanity alive, but smashes all our tech, knocking us back to the stone age. Intelligence forbid!
I see liberal vs. libertarian as a two dimensional thing as depicted here.
I wouldn't mind the survey being twice as long if it allowed it to handle these can't-answer situations, though I would expect it to be the same length but just have a button or two to the right of each entry blank.
I've learned to use the mouse, and not the keyboard, when answering this sort of thing. YMMV.
I did the survey.
I felt that I had to leave blank some of the questions that ask for a probability number, because no answer that complies with the instructions would be right. For instance, I consider the "Many Worlds" hypothesis to be effectively meaningless, since while it does describe a set of plausible alleged facts, there is, as far as I know, no possible experiment that could falsify it. ("Supernatural" is also effectively meaningless, but for a different reason: vagueness. "Magic", to me, describes only situations where Clarke's Third Law applies. And so forth.)
I would like to participate in a deeper discussion of the idea of the Singularity, but don't know if that's welcome on LW. I want to attack the idea on several levels: (1) the definition of it, which may be too vague to be falsifiable; (2) the definition of intelligence -- I don't think we're talking about a mere chess-playing computer, but it's not clear to me whether Minsky's criteria are sufficient; (3) if those first two points are somehow nailed down, then I'm not at all sure that a machine intelligence is desirable, and certainly I'd hesitate to connect one to hardware with enough abilities that the revolution in "I, Robot" becomes possible; and (4) if such a change does happen, I would prefer, and I think most people would insist, that it happen relatively slowly to give everyone then alive time to cope with the change, thus making it not really a singularity in the mathematical sense.
(I do like the transhumanist notion that humans should feel free to modify our own hardware individually, but I don't see that as necessarily connected with a Singularity, and I don't use the jargon of transhumanism for the same reason I avoid the jargon of anarchism when talking politics -- it scares people needlessly.)
I left both MIRI questions blank because I don't know who or what MIRI is.
Re. The Great Stagnation: This theory asserts that we are in an economic stall, if you will, because of a lack of innovation, and is set against the assertion of a "Great Divergence" in which rising income inequality and globalization are to blame for the stall. I didn't answer because I consider both views to be baloney -- we are in an economic stall because of unnecessary and crony-driven overregulation, much of it done in the name of the misguided green and "social justice" movements.
I didn't do the finger length questions; not sure what "the bottom crease" is, or maybe I don't have them. (Do you mean the crease at the base of the fingers, or one farther down on the hand?)
Re. feminism, I answered based on what I believe the current use of the term is, which is not at all like the definition on Wikipedia. Wikipedia calls it more or less pro-equality and I support that, but the current usage is more like "social justice" and that whole concept is complete hooey.
I wish there were an LW-related forum/location where politics are allowed (but easy for those not so inclined to ignore). I would use it, not so much for election-type stuff but for tossing out beliefs/theories on controversies (including some things relevant to a lot of the community, such as the Singularity) and seeing what bounces back.
I wouldn't want to do it if I thought it would generate ill will, but there are certainly lots of folk here whose perspectives would be useful, and who, even if they disagree, would not immediately reach for the slogans of demonization that I hear so much in the outside world.
Apologies if even this post turns out to be so contentious that I shouldn't have said it here.
The big problem with habitually "telling" is that you just about need to already be in an intimate relationship with the person you Tell before you do it more than once or twice. Otherwise you will be dismissed as either a bore or a wimp.
I do think that it is unfair, and a common failure mode, to use the guess culture and then get angry if the other person doesn't read you correctly.
I think it is unfair to get angry at another person (or equivalently, to label him/her "rude") for asking or saying anything when he/she doesn't have good reason to know that the speech is unwelcome.
However, I don't like the notion of these protocols as "cultures" because I don't think anybody follows, or should follow, any one of them consistently all or nearly all the time.
Instead, I believe reality is and should be, that the meaning of a statement which can be parsed as a request depends on how reasonable it would be if the asker (1) expects compliance (perhaps to the point of getting upset if it doesn't happen), (2) intends it merely as a request ("asker culture"), and/or (3) would only dare ask if he is fairly sure the hearer will not take offense. Obviously, as a request goes up the spectrum from something trivial ("Excuse me" as I push through a crowd to get out of a bus) to something the hearer is likely to find quite burdensome, both speakers and hearers tend to move up from interpretation (1) to (2) to (3). Familiarity with the other person also modifies this calculation, but that change can go in either direction depending on what you know about that person and about how he views you.
But where I part ways from the article writer is where he talks about "ask culture" as being superior to "guess culture". About the only place I see anything resembling "guess culture" is where a request (or a statement being parsed as a request, maybe erroneously) is about a subject the hearer has issues about{1}, for instance, when trying to get laid. And as I see it, the mere fact that a typical woman hearing such a request interprets it as a demand (and/or "an example of the guess culture") does not mean that the asker should be blamed for anything of the kind.
{1} I have phrased this to step on as few toes as possible, and thus am avoiding conclusions about what such "issues" may imply about anyone's rationality. And for the same reason I should probably stop here.
If it were a case like you describe (two competing products in a store), I would have to guess, and thus would have to try to think of some "upstream" questions and guess those, too. Not impossible, but unlikely to unearth worthwhile information. For questions as remote as P(aliens), I don't see a reason to bother.
Have you seen David Friedman's discussion of rational voter ignorance in The Machinery of Freedom?
I apologize for the language, but I felt it needed to be said & I don't know a nicer way.
I've expanded on this in the current survey thread.
Bosh. I don't care how smart Omega thinks he is; if he claims to be a perfect predictor, I challenge him to some poker. 'Cause there can be no such animal.
Did that.
Re. relationships: The only people I've heard use "polyamorous" are referring to committed, marriage-like relationships involving more than two adults. There ought to be a category for those of us who don't want exclusivity with any number.
I've left most of the probability questions blank, because I don't think it is meaningfully possible to assign numbers to events I have little or no quantitative information about. For instance, I'll try P(Aliens) when we've looked at several thousand planets closely enough to be reasonably sure of answers about them.
In addition, I don't think some of the questions can have meaningful answers. For example, the "Many Worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics, if true, would have no testable (falsifiable) effect on the observable universe, and therefore I consider the question to be objectively meaningless. The same goes for P(Simulation), and probably P(God).
P(religion) also suffers from vagueness: what conditions would satisfy it? Not only are some religions vaguely defined, but there are many belief systems that are arguably relgions or not religions. Buddhism? Communism? Atheism?
The singularity is vague, too. (And as I usually hear it described, I would see it as a catastrophe if it happened. The SF story "With Folded Hands" explains why.)
Extra credit items:
Great Stagnation -- I believe that the rich world's economy IS in a great stagnation that has lasted for most of a century, but NOT for the reasons Cowen and Thiel suggest. The stagnation is because of "progressive" politics, especially both the welfare state and overregulation/nanny-statism, which destroy most people's opportunities to innovate and profit by it. This is not a trivial matter, but a problem quite comparable to those listed in the "catastrophe" section, and one which may very well prevent a solution to a real catastrophe if we become headed for one. (Both parties' constant practice of campaigning-by-inventing-a-new-phony-emergency-every-month makes the problem worse, too: most rational people now dismiss any cry of alarm as the boy who cried wolf. Certainly the environmental movement, including its best known "scientists", have discredited themselves this way.) This is why the struggle for liberty is so critical.
It seems to me that some of LW's attempts to avoid "a priori" reasoning have tripped up right at their initial premises, by assuming as premises propositions of the form "The probability of possible-fact X is y%." (LW's annual survey repeatedly insists that readers make this mistake, too.)
I may have a guess about whether X is true; I may even be willing to give or accept odds on one or both sides of the question; but that is not the same thing as being able to assign a probability. For that you need conditions (such as where X is the outcome of a die roll or coin toss) where there's a basis for assigning the number. Otherwise the right answer to most questions of "How likely is X?" (where we don't know for certain whether X is true) will be some vague expression ("It could be true, but I doubt it") or simply "I don't know."
The same holds true for all regulations that increase the cost of employing people. European countries, which combine rules such as France's 32-hour work week and Germany's 6 weeks of paid vacation per year with rules that make it very difficult and time-consuming to get rid of an employee (whether for cause or because your industry is in a slump), have made labor there so expensive that those countries have much higher "structural" unemployment rates than the US. ("Structural" being political economist speak for an "irreducible minimum", at least so long as the policy makers are unwilling to consider changing the laws that caused it.) European pundits are starting to call these laws what they are -- old people voting themselves job security at the expense of their children.
The US is in the depression it is precisely because those regulatory and tax burdens are growing faster here than they have in 40 years -- mostly behind closed doors, though Obamacare is playing its part. I largely blame the green movement, because they (or some of them) are the only people besides Middle East terrorists who will actually admit they want us no longer to be a wealthy country. Still, they seem to command a huge legion of dupes, who I hope can be awakened to the fact that this causation exists and do something to stop it.
This seems like another "angels dancing on the head of a pin" question. I am not willing to assign numerical probabilities to any statement whose truth value is unknown, unless there is a compelling reason to choose that specific number (such as, the question is about a predictable process such as the result of a die roll). It seems to me that people who do so assign, are much more likely to get basic problems of probability theory (such as the Monty Hall problem) wrong than those who resist the urge.
I believe it is silly to even try to assign a numerical probability to any event unless you can rigorously derive that number from antecedent circumstances or events (for instance, it can make sense if you are talking about scenarios involving the results of dice rolls). Thus I find the questions in LW's annual survey which demand such numbers annoying and pointless.
As for the errors in predictions of the time or money it will take to build some promised project, there's no mystery; the individuals making those predictions stand to gain substantial money or prestige if the predictions are believed, so they lie (or at least make the rosiest predictions they expect to get away with making). This especially goes for politicians, who have all the more incentive to lie because the law gives them absolute immunity (from, for example, being sued for fraud) for anything they say during legislative debate.
The way to get reliable data about these things is to create incentives that make it in someone's best interest to gather and share that reliable data. For most projects, the simplest and easiest way to do this is to have those who want the project built commission it using their own money, rather than do it through the political system.
I stopped reading at point two, which is not only obvious hogwash but has been used over and over again to rationalize (after the fact) stupid decisions throughout history.
There are in fact some possible good reasons to make irrational decisions (for instance, see Hofstadter's discussion of the Prisoner's Dilemma in Metamagical Themas). But the mere fact that an irrational decision in the past produced a good actual outcome does not change the fact that it was irrational, and therefore presumably stupid. One can only decide using the information available at the time. There is no alternative; not to decide is to decide on a default.
Whether the many-worlds hypothesis is true, false, or meaningless (and I believe it's meaningless precisely because all branches you're not on are forever inaccessible/unobservable), the concept of a universe being observable has more potential states than true and false.
Consider our own universe as it's most widely understood to be. Each person can only observe (past) or affect (future) events within his light cone. All others are forever out of reach. (I know, it may turn out that QM makes this not true, but I'm not going there right now.) Thus you might say that no two people inhabit exactly the same universe, but each his own, though with a lot of overlap.
Time travel, depending on how it works (if it does), may or may not alter this picture much. Robert Forward's Timemaster gives an example of one possible way that does not require a many-worlds model, but in which time "loops" have the effect of changing the laws of statistics. I especially like this because it provides a way to determine by experiment whether or not the universe does work that way, even though in some uses of the words it abolishes cause and effect.
Boredom is far from the only bad reason that some journals refuse some submissions. Every person in the chain of publication, and that of peer review, must be assumed at least biased and potentially dishonest. Therefore "science" can never be defined by just one database or journal, or even a fixed set of either. Excluded people must always be free to start their own, and their results judged on the processes that produced them. Otherwise whoever is doing the excluding is not to be trusted as an editor.
I hasten to add that this kind of bias exists among all sides and parties.
I predict that in 2012:
The Republicans will nominate someone for President whose voting record has been to increase spending (that is, someone other than Ron Paul and Gary Johnson). As a result, the "Tea Party" vote will split itself between the Republican and Libertarian nominees, and President Obama will be reelected.
Congress will remain split close to 50-50 -- close enough that neither party will have a veto- or filibuster-proof majority in both houses. However, the most extreme members of both parties will be successfully defeated by targeted campaigns, thus toning down some of the rhetoric if not the feelings that underlie it.
The Euro will fall apart, but the EU as a whole will not.
Banks in both Europe and America will continue to successfully resist demands that their balance sheets reflect the worthlessness of large parts of their asset totals (mortgages here, government bonds in EU countries), because that would force governments to shut them down as insolvent and pay out huge amounts in insurance claims.
As a corollary, foreclosure activity will continue to be very slow, and government will continue to grant various kinds of relief to homeowners trying to forestall it. Result: there will be few or no housing starts in the US, and in fact, we will probably see a new federal program to buy up and demolish many of the "surplus" houses the banks are now holding.
The Supreme Court will uphold ObamaCare. Meanwhile, Congress will pass a half-baked "repeal" bill which leaves intact enough of the unsustainable parts of ObamaCare (especially the requirement that insurers accept anyone, regardless of pre-existing conditions) that the private health-insurance industry will be entirely or mostly destroyed.
There will be a major war, starting in the Middle East. Israel will lose (75%). China will probably join in on the radical-Muslim side. Iran will try to use its nukes but they will be duds. Israel will not use theirs. The US will send aid but will not directly engage Israel's enemies. Japan will join in on Israel's side after the radicals sink oil tankers on the way to Japan. The Russians will sit this one out. Turkey may or may not take part, but if they do it will be against Israel.
I'll bite: how am I supposed to judge (or predict) the usefulness of facts when I first see them, in time to avoid storing the useless ones?
I think the closest we get to this is that every time we remember something, we also edit that memory, thus (if we are rational enough) tossing out the useless or unreliable parts or at least flagging them as such. If this faculty worked better I might find it a convincing argument for "intelligent design," but the real thing, like so much else in human beings, is so haphazard that it reinforces my lack of belief in that idea.
There's also the subjectivism of taste, sometimes known as consumer sovereignty (the idea, from David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom, that a person's own good is defined as whatever he says it is). Not believing in that leads to outbreaks of senseless and counterproductive nannyism, whether carried out alone or with the help of authorities.
Isn't pure mathematics a counterexample?
Or at least, that at some point, if you want to improve your lot, you need to leave off thinking long enough to build, buy, or improve some gadget or agreement that will actually help. Labor-saving tech really does equal progress.
I don't know what you mean by "science can't think of anything better".
I'm simply using the standard that a statement is objectively meaningful if it states some alleged objective fact.
I reject the notion of hidden variables (except possibly the core of oneself, the existence of the ego) as un-Bayesian. With that one potential exception, all objective facts are testable, at least in principle (though some may be impractical to test).
I fail to see how one can be rational and not believe that. I'm not saying this to insult, but to get an explanation of what you think I've overlooked.
I can't make sense of your reply. The first "sentence" isn't a sentence or even coherent.
But perhaps I myself could have been clearer by saying: The instant there's a split, all branches except the one you're in effectively cease to exist, forever. Does that help?
It seems to me that even a completely unprejudiced person in Bob's shoes may very well rationally decide that it's not worth the trouble to try to understand Alice's problem. Indeed, I've yet to be convinced that empathy is worth the effort required to achieve it in more than a handful of cases.
When this sort of thing has happened to me, I've said more or less "I'll be here if you decide you want my help with whatever it is," and then turned my back. It seemed to me, then and now, that any other response would have been a complete waste of time and effort.
I gave a low probability, not because I don't think that reviving people is possible, or discoverable soon, but because I see some political trends today that I think are very likely to result in mobs destroying the facilities before we can be revived. (And even if that doesn't happen, sooner or later some country is going to use nanotech in military ways, which -- if the human race survives -- may well result in the entire field being either banned or classified and staying that way.)
But I'm signed up, because it's a bet I can't lose.
"Out of wedlock marriage" would be a neat trick. :-)
The only way I've found is to attack the idea of omnipotence on the basis of logic. If the questioner is allowed to insist I "consider the possibility of a universe where logic isn't valid," I can only dismiss his question as nonsense.
I don't like that practice. "I am an atheist" is not a good proxy for "I am a Communist."
I wasn't and still am not sure what "Virtue Ethics" is supposed to mean. My personal ethics are based on the libertarian "non-aggression principle," in other words, don't violate the rights of other persons, and beyond that, do whatever you want. (Which does not mean I don't see a point to charity -- I just see charity as one of many things you might do with your money or time because it makes you happy. In my experience, enough people feel that way that it's rare for anyone to starve or freeze unless he behaves so badly that he doesn't deserve to be helped.)
Apologies if this violates a politics ban, but I can't really answer an ethics question without going there.
As far as the objective "existence" of morals: it's a meaningless idea. Even if there is just one God, his opinion doesn't automatically become The Truth any more than yours or mine does.
Ultimately, morals/ethics are a matter of taste and nothing more. But they're a unique exception to the old saw "there's no accounting for taste" because your moral code determines whether you can be trusted (to do any particular thing someone else expects of you, a question that of course depends on who and what it is).
It's a logical consequence of the premises. The instant there's a split, all branches except the one you're in become totally and permanently unreachable by any means whatever. If they did not, the conservation laws would be violated.
If all other interpretations made testable predictions, it wouldn't be enough unless you could somehow eliminate any possibility that didn't make the list because nobody's thought of it yet. It's like the fallacy in Pascal's Wager: all possible religions belong in the hat.
I took the survey.
I didn't like it because some of the questions offered too narrow a range of answers for my taste. Example: I consider the "many worlds" hypothesis to be objectively meaningless (because there's no possible experiment that can test it). The same goes for "this universe is a simulation."
As for the "singularity", I see it as nearly meaningless too. Every definition of it I've seen amounts to a horizon, beyond which the future (or some aspects of it) will be unimaginable -- but from how far past? Like a physical horizon, if such a "limit of vision" exists it must recede as you approach it. Even a cliff can be looked over.