hither_shores

> misleading manner by labeling speculative ethical behavior as “EA” when it’s neither effective

I agree that they're ineffective, but I don't see any evidence that the MIRI types are lying - they're trying to help, they think they're helping ... and they're mostly wrong. It happens.

> But this kind of bootstrapping of classroom ethical dilemmas into actually diverting donated money away from human welfare efforts astounds me.

Are you sure that's what's actually going on? Donations and especially effort are not fungible. The techy libertarian futurist types in the MIRI orbit, for instance, are so far as I can tell simply not as bothered by poverty as Singer et al. A world in which they're not worried about AI risk is not a world in which they give just as much to other causes; it's a world in which they give less.

I don't know about "EA rationales", but rule utilitarianism is unpopular among philosophers largely because it's believed to collapse into act utilitarianism. The phil101 caricature is that rule utilitarianism says "no stealing, because 'no stealing' is a rule that increases utility" and act utilitarianism says "steal if you think it maximizes utility" - but on the one hand "no stealing, except for bread to feed your starving child" is an even better rule, and so on; and on the other hand not incorporating uncertainty into your decision procedure isn't being a good act utilitarian, it's just being an idiot. And so in practice they endorse the same decision procedures in pursuit of the same end.

> what precisely has the EA movement done to reduce, even marginally, the risk of a nuclear war?

Nothing that I'm aware of. In general I think that most of the current "longtermist" organizations are useless - but that doesn't mean they're incorrect.

When did I say it did?

> Consequently, we should divert money away from the welfare of people living today and towards efforts that maximize the likelihood of a galaxy filled with colonized planets. If that sounds ridiculous, it's because it is.

It sounds ridiculous to you because you framed it in an uncharitable way. Another way of saying "maximize the likelihood of a galaxy filled with colonized planets", so far as contemporary people are concerned, is "minimize the likelihood of civilizational collapse". Even a marginal reduction in the risk of nuclear war, for instance, would be a very good thing.

If by "EA the organization" you mean the Center for Effective Altruism, it came out of the Oxford philosophy department.

> Haskell is basically a category theory framework.

Haskell probably draws more from category theory than any other mainstream language, but in absolute terms that's still not very much. It's okayish for modelling cartesian closed categories, but if you want any more structure than that things get quite painful. Even something as simple as a category with finitely many objects requires stupid amounts of type-level boilerplate.

> You could rephrase Lisp as a Unityped system, but I seriously doubt it would be consistent.

It's not. (x -> x) is always inhabited, so if you have a fixed point combinator (x -> x) -> x then every theorem is true.

No, it isn't. A star-autonomous cartesian category is just a preorder. Chu(Set, n) is star-autonomous but not a preorder, and therefore not cartesian. Or more concretely: cartesian categories are models for type systems with copying and deleting, but the Chu construction builds a model for a linear type system.

There's not really a connection here, the category of vector spaces isn't cartesian closed.

> Was Tolkien right leaning himself, I would be surprised by that but I honestly don’t know.

Yes, but the small-c conservative Catholic sort of right-wing. He would have hated reactionary modernists like Thiel.

> But some sets of data and some operations on them that fulfill some formally stated requirements are just an abstract algebra, aren't they?

Not quite. A variety of algebras (which is usually what people have in mind when they talk about "algebraic structures" in general) is a collection of operations with equational laws, meaning that they're of the form "for all x_0, x_1, ... (however many variables you need), expression_1(x_0, x_1, ...) = expression_2(x_0, x_1, ...)", where the expressions are built up out of your operators.

Fields are the classic example of a structure studied by algebraists which is nonetheless not a variety of algebras: division isn't described by equational laws, because it's defined for everything except zero. This makes fields much harder to work with than e.g. groups or rings, in both math and programming.

> Addition is move and multiplication is also a move. a + b move from 0 a step then b steps. a * b is move a step b times.

By "move" do you mean adding 1? If so, then no. Consider, for instance, the complex numbers: multiplication by i isn't any sort of iterated addition.

> It's mentioned later, but the "math friendly" versions satisfy the axioms of a group and a field, which only works if the modulus is a prime.

The integers mod n >= 1 are always a group (under addition), only the field structure requires prime n.

> Imagine I want to test a function that operates on quite large application state but not all app state is necessary for that function

If not all app state is necessary for that function, it shouldn't require the whole app state in its arguments.

     type AppState = { databaseConnection: DatabaseConnection, env : "dev" | "prod", apiToken: string, userId: string, ... } & SomeOtherStuff

     const dropTables = (app: Pick<AppState, "databaseConnection"> & {env: "dev"} ) => app.databaseConnection.dropTables()

Conversely, if a function you don't control says it needs the whole app state, believe it.