13of40

You sound successful relative to where you could have ended up.

I was in Jutland, in Northwest Denmark recently, and the backstory of that place is that a thousand years ago it was covered in thick pine forest. Medieval people cut the trees down for firewood and agriculture, which led to an ecological disaster from erosion that covered entire farms and villages in sand. Hundreds of years later, at the beginning of the 20th century, however, people started replanting forests and have had success in mitigating a lot of the erosion.

Now, knowing that the line between man and other animals is totally arbitrary, we should be fine to retell that story with beavers instead of people, right?

(I won't even get into how I flew there at 1000kph in a giant metal vehicle and carried a universal translator in my pocket, also neither of which were made by beavers.)

Not sure I'm totally understanding here, but it sounds like LinkedIn turned on (probably AI-based) porn scanning on messages, there was a false positive, and the guy wasn't able to escalate to support. Is there an implication that it was blocked for political reasons?

I apologize, but I'm trying to parse what you're saying and I can't seem to find the meat. I understand you're trying to insult me or whatever, but are you trying to say anything relevant to the topic?

I don't think I actually asserted anything, but let me give a shot at explaining:

The model is that higher values of G/B are better, where G is good years per capita and B is bad years per capita, so the ethical thing to do is maximize G and/or minimize B. I called this "basic" because even though it tends to fall apart when scaled up, I think it captures what most people think of ethics. It's good for making tactical decisions about things like "should I punch that guy" or whatever.

For #1, where ethics would be just a fiction we made up to support a social game, what I mean is: People in a group have to play a prisoners' dilemma game where they find a balance of cooperation and sharing of resources. One way to reach that balance is to assume good will and treat others like you want to be treated. (Right up until someone violates that, then it's hyperbolic response time...) If ethics is just something people made up to get everyone to maintain that balance, then higher G/B being better is rooted in the same fiction.

For #2: My definition of G and B included good and bad experiences by animals, not just people. That means it's possible that over a billion years or so you could still achieve higher G/B by going back to a "natural" world inhabited by sentient but less intelligent animals.

For #3: It could be that the G/B in a natural world would actually be lower than if it was dominated by humans, because several billion people being able to live out their lives before the crash could result in a big enough G value to outweigh the eventual suffering.

For #4: If life as a human counted more towards G than the same amount of life as a beaver, then it could be a force multiplier for #3.

Do you have another model that changes the answers?

I'm on the fence about whether I agree with this. The way I see it, if you look at beavers, ants, or trees, they change the landscape but they do it based on behaviors that are encoded in their genes. That means a beaver can create a lake, but its descendants have to be able to live with that using the same slow-changing genetic programming, otherwise they die off. With humans, we can adapt new ways to live in the altered environment, even if it would have been incompatible with the lives of our ancestors. If we kill off all the salmon and whales, for example, within a generation or two we can pivot to factory-farmed chicken and petroleum. Once we've tapped that out we can do soy protein and windfarms.

I say I'm on the fence because on a longer time scale, that kind of mental adaptation might not be that much different from genetic adaptation and we'll still have to find equilibrium or die out.

As far as the ethics question goes, if we use the most basic model and say that the ethical thing is that which promotes the most "good-life-years per capita" versus "bad-life-years per capita", where capita means one of the sentient residents of the planet, there are a few ways to look at it:

1. Ethics is just a fiction that humans have made up to support the prisoners' dilemma style of cooperation game we play, and there's no real answer.

2. The billon or two twilight years of our planet are better spent in rough equilibrium, where tigers exist, but most animals get some time to stretch in the sun, nuzzle their young, etc.

3. Life in equilibrium is actually cold, brutal, and short for most of the sentient animals involved, so providing a higher level of comfort for a population of ten billion people is better, even if it eventually crashes.

4. The experience of a human counts more than that of an animal, so a high human population with a decent standard of living for a long enough time pushes the needle past what a much longer natural equilibrium would achieve.

> The entire system has been acting as if GenAI was right around the corner.

To be clear, I think it is. It's just not going to be a hologram of a wizard in a room you can ask a question to for a quarter, which is what these chat bots and copilots you see today are modeled around.

There was a movie that came out in 2001 called "Artificial Intelligence", at a time when we were still figuring out how things like search engines and the online economy were going to work. It had a scene where the main characters went to a city and visited a pay-per-question AI oracle. It was very artistically done, but it really revealed (in hindsight) how naive we were about how "online" was going to turn out.

When I look at the kinds of AI projects I have visibility into, there's a parallel where the public are expecting a centralized, all knowing, general purpose AI, but what it's really going to look like is a graph of oddball AI agents tuned for different optimizations.

One node might be slow and expensive but able to infer intent from a document, but its input is filtered by a fast and cheap one that eliminates uninteresting content, and it could offload work to a domain-specific one that knows everything about URLs, for example. More like the network of small, specialized computers scattered around your car than a central know-it-all computer.

I googled that recently, and it sounds like:

They don't get reused.

There are about 70 years left.

The government is punting the problem to future people and there's no solution yet.

That's good to know - thanks! My astigmatism one is definitely special, because it takes an extra two or three weeks to get it from Costco, but I didn't know there was an orientation mark on it. I'll take a look.

I wear soft contacts and one of my eyes has astigmatism. I've never understood how a symmetrical lens can correct an asymmetrical eyeball. Another strange thing I've seen is that after having put these things in my eyes about 2000 times at this point, I think I can tell that they vary in thickness, sometimes even in the same pack, but it doesn't seem to affect their performance. It all seems a little magical, so I guess I should find some time and go down the youtube rabbit hole that probably exists.