Hell Must Be Destroyed
[Originally published in Qualia Computing] Singer called the movement that grew up around him “effective altruism”, and its rallying cry was that one ought to spend every ounce of one’s energy doing whatever most relieves human suffering, most likely either feeding the poor or curing various tropical diseases. Again, something his opponents rejected as impossible, unworkable, another example of liberal fanaticism. Really? Every ounce of your energy? Again, they could have just read their Bibles. Deuteronomy 6:5: “And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Then Singer changed his tune. In the 1970s, after the sky cracked and the world changed, he announced that charity was useless, that feeding the poor was useless, that curing tropical diseases was useless. There was only one cause to which a truly rational, truly good human being could devote his or her life. Hell must be destroyed. The idea of billions of human beings suffering unbearable pain for all eternity so outweighed our little earthly problems that the latter didn’t even register. He began meeting with his disciples in secret, teaching them hidden Names he said had been vouchsafed to him by angels. Thamiel put a price on his life – quite a high price actually. Heedless of his own safety, Singer traveled what remained of the civilized world, making converts wherever he went, telling them to be perfect as God was perfect, and every speech ended the same way. Hell must be destroyed. – INTERLUDE ג: CANTORS AND SINGERS from UNSONG An angel appears on Earth. This genderless being connected to God shows up on every screen on Earth at once and asks us if we are interested in drastically improving life on Earth. A large enough portion of those who hear the message (which gets a coverage of 80%+ of people worldwide) see into their souls and find the willingness to make life better, and then
Think about the PageRank step. As you increase the size of the SCC that falls within the topological container where the holistic step is applied, a Tier 1 emulator will take longer and longer to compute the next step. To generate this step "all at once" you will need additional accounting mechanisms, like stopping the advance of the network everywhere else except in the topological container, have additional memory slots to store partially computed steps, and have to deal with an increasingly larger number of steps until convergence. Is it possible to do this? In one sense, yes: you can carefully, intelligently, and deliberately design a Tier 1 system to do this.... (read 499 more words →)