I am a great fan of both guys, but I don't think Weiner's bitterness goes well with Yudkowsky's pathos.
I'm not sure if I'd qualify Weiner as bitter. His comics tend to be pessimistic, sure, but a lot of that is the rule of funny. Comedy is about human pain.
I'm not sure if I'd qualify Weiner as bitter. His comics tend to be pessimistic, sure, but a lot of that is the rule of funny. Comedy is about human pain.
Weiner talks about things that may make other people bitter and so those other people may expect him to be bitter because he acknowledges those bad things. Instead I see Weiner see the world as it is, exaggerate it for the sake of satire and then delight in it. You don't need rose coloured glasses to be content.
SMBC on choosing your simulations carefully
More specifically, on when to simulate, not what. The error is in considering the simulation chip a reason to not care about death.
The error is in considering the simulation chip a reason to not care about death.
In the comic, the woman is arguing that the chip is a reason to not care about death as a way to disarm a threat. Modifying your preferences for game theoretic reasons can be a very sensible thing to do.
Fair enough, but the point seems to be that the woman didn't modify her preferences sufficiently, or didn't fully think through the modifications - in effect, she was bluffing, even if perhaps she didn't realise it.
In the comic, the woman is arguing that the chip is a reason to not care about death as a way to disarm a threat. Modifying your preferences for game theoretic reasons can be a very sensible thing to do.
It can be. It wasn't this time. It resulted in her death.
My first thought: people chipped liked that would have so much more incentive to suicide in case of trouble. My second thought: chipped people would care a lot less about living a safe and healthy lifestyle, since they get to live out the rest of their normal life span in the chip-world matrix.
My first thought: Can you trigger the chip without dying, and live happily for orders of magnitude longer?
choosing your simulations carefully
For long form (and quite pleasant) for of this argument, see Inception http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1375666/ .
I'm increasingly impressed by the power of Zach Wiener's comic to demonstrate in a few images why hard problems are hard. It would be a vast task, but perhaps it would be useful to create an index of such problem-demonstrating comics to add to the Wiki, giving us something to point newbies at which would be less intimidating than formal Sequence postings. I get the impression that a common hurdle is just to get people to accept that problems of AI (and simulation, ethics, what have you) are actually difficult.