the Bay has taken a nosedive in terms of prices since many tech companies have stayed remote post-pandemic
Has this assessment changed since then? I hear many companies are back to on-site.
How well booked is Lighthaven usually? Or rather: Has there been any need for extra capacity?
Some thoughts.
From something like a functionalist perspective, where pleasure and pain exist because they have particular functions in the brain, I would not expect pleasure and pain to become more intense merely because the brain happens to have more neurons.
For clarity, my first reading of this was to consider the possible interpretation of a binary distinction: That either the whole entity can experience pain or not. And thus we'd have to count the entities as a measure of welfare.
I agree that weighing by neurons doesn't seem appropriate when pain is not a result of individual neurons but their assembly. Weighing by neurons then is not much different from weighing by weight conditioned on having the required complexity. But why would a large being have a higher weight than a smaller one, everything considered equal? Wouldn't that priviledge large animals (and even incentivise growth)?
For a comparison, consider the sharpness of our senses.
A comment on possible misinterpretations: You should rule out (if intended) that people think you equate sense resolution with pain sensation intensity. I think you don't, but I'm not very sure.
What I think is the case is that more intelligent animals - especially more social animals - have more distinct sources of pleasure and pain (we can feel a broad range of social emotions, both good and bad, that solitary animals lack).
Yes, social animals often possess more elaborate ways to express pain, including facial expressions, vocalizations, and behavioral changes, which can serve communicative functions within their group. However, suppression of pain expression is also widespread, especially in species where showing pain could lower social rank or make an individual vulnerable to predation or aggression[1]. The question is what this expression tells us about the sensation. For example, assuming introversion is linked to this expression, does it imply that extroverts feel more pain? I agree that more complex processing is needed to detect (reflect) on pain. Pain expression can serve signalling functions such as alerting without reflection, but for more specific adaptation, such as familial care, require empathy, which arguably requires modeling other's perceptions. Because expressing pain is suppressed in some species, we have to face this dichotomy: If the expression of pain informs about the amount or intensity of pain, then it follows that the same amount of injury can lead to very different amounts of pain, including none, even within a species. But if the expression of pain doesn't tell us anything about the amount of pain, then the question is, what does?
Yes, that happens a lot. The question is then maybe a differential one: What is the responsibility of the author in a political post vs. one that tries to improve the discourse?
I agree that the authors have a responsibility to communicate clearly. I also think readers have an obligation to read charitably, simply because the author can't anticipate all possible audiences and interpretations. The question really is how large is the relative effort each is expected to take. And here, I'd argue, the fundamental asymmetry between writers and readers informs an answer: A single person writes, but an article is read by many, many more people (a known mantra from coding for code quality). Whether people think about it in this terms or not, processes tend to take this into account. Large newspapers used to have almost paranoid quality control to avoid even small inconveniences on readers.
Question to the moderators: How often is a LW post with karma 10, 50, 100, 200 typically read?
- ^
See the sources for "Code is written once but read many times."
1...but you are using a phone now. Are you using LLMs? Maybe in both cases it is about using the tool in the way that benefits most?
I can't help with developers, but I can probably help with a dozen gamers (mostly teens, twens) who would probably like to do playtesting.
Sure "The Cerebellum Is The Seat of Classical Conditioning." But I'm not sure it's the only one. Delay eyeblink conditioning is cerebellar-dependent, which we know because of lesion studies. This does not generalize to all conditioned responses:
- Trace eyeblink conditioning requires hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex in addition to cerebellum (Takehara 2003).
- Fear conditioning is driven by the amygdala, not cerebellum.
- Hebbian plasticity isn’t crushed by cerebellar learning. Cerebellum long-term depression is a timing‐sensitive variant of Hebb’s rule (van Beugen et al. 2013).
1I'm not sure that complexity is protecting us. On the one hand, there are just 1MB of bases coding for the brain (and less for the connectome), but that doesn't mean we can read it and it may take a long time to reverse engineer.
source: https://xkcd.com/1605/
On the other hand, our existing systems of LLMs are already much more complex than that. Likely more than a GB of source code for modern LLM-running compute center servers. And here the relationship between the code and the result is better known and can be iterated on much faster. We may not need to reverse engineer the brain. Experimentation may be sufficient.
I agree, and I have commented on this many times.
A good overview seems to be A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications (PDF):
Personally, I like the Leibnizian Definition Of Consciousness even though it is simplifying things too much.
Thanks, yes that mostly answers it. I got curious when the Buddhist temple thing was mentioned. 11 of 52 weekends not-booked implies a very high utilization, and I'd guess that you had to turn away customers (or at least delay) and it seems you could defer to other locations (though nothing beats Lighthaven of course).