hasbroslasher

> You're free to define experience differently but usually it devolves into defining unknown by unknown.

Many philosophers would suggest that we don't bother "defining" anything at all, strictly because of the tendency for things to devolve into a semantic death-trap. So instead, we just kind of take it for granted that everyone knows what an experience is, at a base level. For instance, it was an Experience to see Jimi Hendrix. However, I definitely have not had that particular experience. There are experiences I could have, such as the experience of going on a roller coaster, or going into space, and ones that I could not have, such as the experience that an anglerfish has when it eats. The question at hand is whether or not these experiences have anything to do with each other, whether there's a "Grand Unified Theory" of experience and consciousness that allows us to make mutual sense of these disparate experiences, or whether there's some limit to what things might constitute an experiment - e.g. the experience of being a rock thrown through a window.

> Experience = event that changes the model of the world you have in your brain

So if I don't have a brain, then I can't have experiences? What if we find aliens out there that don't have brains? Or computers? Are they a-experiential by nature of not having brains, or is it something deeper?

> Indeed, that's why putting meaningless arbitrarily defined touchy-feely words in physics is a bad idea

We're not talking strictly about physics, though. I doubt most physicist professors would not let you bring up questions like these in physics class because they are the subject of an entire field of philosophy. And while there is relevant science to our debate, there's a lot of "soft" arguments outside of the scientific worldview that you should at least read and consider. See Jackson's knowledge argument, Block's Chinese Brain, or Nagel's "what it's like to be a bat" arguments. They "touch" on the uncomfortable ubiquity of things that we "feel" to be outside of a purely scientific view of the world.

> We can deduce from that change that your internal model of the world changed to associate "buzz" with "food" so you experienced our experiment.

This is a bit off kilter. Do people with memory or learning disorders, then, not have "experiences" because they don't learn? What about those who are deaf? You're essentializing consciousness into "ability to learn by hearing and rationally deduction". Computers can take audio input and learn from it with very primitive machine learning models - does that mean that the computer is having experiences akin to our own human experiences?

My advice is to give philosophy its due course! Read up on the touchy-feely stuff because it can be profoundly interesting.

Parable: Company wants to move "into the cloud" and adopts AWS managed services or Kubernetes to recreate and re-platform existing and functional, though sketchy, on-prem services. "Agile coaches" and "Solution Architects" advise rewriting the old code because of its fundamental alien-ness in a cloud-only environment. So it's a rewrite. But of course, the re-write doesn't work, primarily because of fundamental misunderstandings about what properties allow software to scale across many machines, in many time zones, running processes 1000's of times per day. So it becomes necessary to either cut losses and re-write the re-write or decide to start iterating now on the crappy re-write to make it closer in terms of functionality to what already existed in the crappy on-prem systems - which begs the question of why you didn't just iterate on the original sketchy code in the first place.

There are times when rewriting does make sense - rare though they may be. I've only seen a few, and they always had to do with improving stability and reducing the potential for bugs. None of them required you to use the latest shiny to "completely reimagine what software could be doing for your business". I've helped to rewrite subscription-management systems that ended up noticeably reducing churn and cutting out spurious chargebacks from customers who couldn't navigate our bug-prone subscription service wasteland. But some refactors are so labor intensive that they amount to re-writes, even if you're using the same tools and languages. Some code is acutely awful and it needs to die for people to be able to go to sleep at night without having to drink a fifth of whiskey beforehand. Some atrocities don't need to exist.

But, again, if the reason for a refactor or rewrite is summed up as "we're bored and want to play with these new shinies" then you are in for it. If rewriting provides you with some sort of new business capability or fundamentally changes a business process drastically for the better, then go ahead. But in my experience, if a technology or paradigm is fundamentally "so much better than what we do now", then it should work so well with what we do now so well that it doesn't require fundamental rewrites of large software systems. So rewriting things in Python or C++ is great, or using Kubernetes instead of Lambdas or whatever is fine, but it's more important that these paradigm shifts can be incremental rather than a complete recreation of what already exists, that the gulf between refactoring and rewriting can be relatively small instead of two completely different processes.

> You cannot experimentally decide if atoms experience anything, the fact that they do or don't doesn't change any prediction for how they behave over time. It's meaningless, like wondering if magic exists but is actively hiding from us. Paranoia is that way.

This has so much potential to become a semantic death trap - but let me ask if you think even human experience could be experimentally tested? If you put me in a room, what could you do to see whether or not I'm "having an experience"? Would the mere act of placing me there be an "experience" or would it be a false positive? What does "non-experience" even mean? I don't see it as counterintuitive to suggest that normally inanimate things like rocks can have experiences - though their experiences are fundamentally different than ours. For instance, we will never be smelted, turned into concrete, etc. and rocks don't have memory or feeling apparatus like we do.. but they do "experience" reality on a very simple level.

> this sentiment is illustrative of the world that the internet has created. on the internet, you never have to deal with something that bores you -- you can always open a new tab and do something else.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that this is flat-out untrue, it's just that the repeated cashing-in on an old and reductionistic theories of current events is becoming increasingly transparent. It's akin to thinkers like J.B. Peterson criticizing postmodernism 10-15 years after the movement ended, and solely by repeating the arguments that ended it. It might be true or consistent or whatever, but the point is that it focuses the dialogue on a too-narrow set of theories about the world.

Even your own statement, "Internet bad, makes people incapable of dealing with boredom" is a trope that, regardless of its truth value, doesn't address deeper issues with human communication and entertainment. People essentially said the same things about TV's 40-50 years ago: "you don't have to be bored, just change the channel!"

Yeah, this is one tired trope. I'm especially bored of the "Facebook causes the rise of nationalism/fascism" rhetoric - I think it's pretty convenient to scapegoat the Zuck (who is an asshole, oblivious, naive, etc.) with something so complex and fueled by so many factors outside of the internet. "Russians made us do it because Facebook" is such a wonderful cop out because it means we can't really do anything to fix it, and it's totally not our fault. And we're addicted to such messages - that the terrorists hate our freedom, that poor people are just jealous losers, that scientists are moralizing assholes for telling us not to eat steak every day - and we even prefer these messages because they let us be the victim of the cruel outside world, rather than understanding how our own complacency, ignorance, or greed has worsened situations.

None of these articles place as much emphasis on the selling-off of our regulatory systems, the dismantling of election law, the homogenization of American thought in the televisual era, or the truly rampant epidemics of complacency, addiction, hedonism, and consumerism as possible catalysts behind a nation rapidly declining into total social schism.

In theory battery tech can fuel Industry, though the ironic chicken-and-egg of the situation should be clear. Obviously we should invest in updated, safer, more efficient nuclear tech, but the public image is so bad that we might as well use coal and spend extra money on carbon capture

This is some great advice in my opinion. Every project starts from a base - give it a shitty base, and you're always going to have problems. Spend the time to write an OK base that doesn't try to do anything clever but organizes code in a clear and sane way and you'll be reaping the dividends for years to come. There is nothing more valuable than, from day one, unit testing, organizing files in a clear way, preventing clutter, and starting writing basic documentation of how to work with your software. These simple cues will remind you and others of what the expectations are for your project.

As popular as it is to say "just solve the problem in front of you", no one actually does that. No one sits down to work on something with one problem - the sit down with likely hundreds, all vying to be solved. Average engineers will look at one, solve it, test it, put it in a text file, push it to prod, and say "look, done!" Good engineers will look at the whole class of problems and recognize commonalities that inform basic architectural and infrastructural decisions.

I think your point about the personal aspect of work is most relevant. I personally would be mortified to work at a company that was always in the news for various scandals and generally being full of shit. Not that I'd assume anyone who works there to be full of shit - just that I wouldn't want my friends making fun of me for working for the Zuck. Facebook just isn't cool anymore in my neck of the woods and there's no social capital in using it or working there as far as I can see.

I'm not necessarily advocating for socialism, I'm just suggesting that the USA government spends more on incentivizing technological innovation in areas that have real payouts for humanity. It's almost a tautology that if you started offering government jobs at $100k a year and funding to work on interesting, novel problems, you'd attract a whole lot of people who are bored and disenfranchised with adtech or high finance.

I think thesis is absolutely ridiculous: "we need a group of new businesses to rise up and make money off of solving tech addiction"

There's not a lot of money to be made in stopping people from self-abstaining from pleasure. If someone wants to quit drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes, then they can do so without having to pay for much (assuming they're not vulnerable to D.T. health wise). And while there's marginal amounts of money to be made off of nicotine patches or AA literature, these products pale in comparison to the amount of money generated by the alcohol and tobacco industries.

1. Yeah, sure we have a lot of minds working on AE, but are you really going to argue that working on Farmville is even comparable to the task of establishing the infrastructure and social changes needed to make AE universally solvent? No where am I saying we need an Ah-Ha moment. We need people who can work and proper incentives from the supposedly smart people who run the show in government and industry.

2. If you're unfamiliar with the environmental problems and inefficiencies present in our current food system, I implore you to do some research and get back to me. Decentralized, high-efficiency, urban food production is going to become more and more necessary as human populations continue to move into cities and global warming reduces crop viability in much of the world.

3. I don't understand how "establishment of large scale infrastructure" is a blocker to what I'm saying. Large scale infrastructure means you need smart people to design and build things to make a goal possible. You need "large scale infrastructure" like railroads to ship goods across the U.S. but when that was a need in the 17th century no one was grousing about how much work it was going to be.

4. Say what you will, but a system of distributed C02 scrubbers powered by alternative energy is at least a feasible way to prevent a Hothouse Earth scenario. Better than just accepting climatic doom through inaction.

5. Social democracy doesn't mean we become out-and-out Marxists, it just means that maybe we reconsider government in relation to what people need. Germany is a social democracy, USA is a democracy where people go without clean drinking water. Talk about a false dichotomy.

I believe Western imperialism has something to do with it... While it's true that capitalism has improved outcomes for some nations, it's also true that capitalist exploitation in Africa and South America really messed up the way their world works. It's made it so that free markets had something to fix later on, not fixed a pre-existing problem with these countries.

People can choose what to believe and all, but it's pretty hard to look at things like the African slave trade or Diamond mining in Zimbabwe or Sierra Leone and find anything but capitalism and imperialism run amok.

This person is saying is that our economic system incentivizes profit, not that it mandates it for every agent. So while a few relatively well-off, well-educated, and principled Googlers can quit over perceived injustice, many people either can't economically justify such a choice, don't know enough to know that there's a problem with their work, or simply don't care and take the money over morals.

And furthermore, when was the last time you saw someone held to account for their job title? I've done that and every time it results in me alienating someone, because no one wants to lie to themselves and be forced to answer that they work at Raytheon because they think that's the way to do good in the world.