This is getting a bit into the weeds, but I find that this blog post mirrors my experience with Turing incomplete languages: https://neilmitchell.blogspot.com/2020/11/turing-incomplete-languages.html?m=1 (it also has the advantage of talking about a language that I've used in industry, and can personally attest to a little).
Even if there's a sophisticated and more accurate way of describing the problem space, practicality can often push you back to a more general description with an extra hacky constraint (resource limits) shoved on top.
Is this type of course structure typical in US universities? It seems very strange to me that real analysis wouldn't be a first semester class, or that such a large proportion of classes in a maths degree would be on anything but maths.
Am I alone in not seeing any positive value whatsoever in humanity, or specific human beings, being reconstructed? If anything, it just seems to increase the S-risk of humanlike creatures being tortured by this ASI.
As for more abstract human values, I'm not remotely convinced that we could either:
a) Convince such a more technologically advanced civilization to update towards our values.
or
b) That they would interpret them in a way that's meaningful to me, and not actively contra my interests.
I suspect, like many things in politics, that the main issue here is domestic politics more than foreign affairs.
If you've ever compared election results between single and multi-member systems, you'll have noticed a trend. Even if via first preference count, a minor party seems to best represent a significant chunk of the population, unless they're geographically concentrated you can expect them to pick up on the order of ~0 seats.
Similarly, if we're not going to abandon democratic principles, we should probably have the consent of the majority in an area before we perform an experiment on them. Problem with this is that even if world/country wide there's a quorum of people who would consent to a given experiment, it's highly unlikely that they all live in the same place.
While something like a Schengen area might in principle alleviate some of these concerns, it introduces two main additional ones:
1) Does your experiment actually improve society? Or does it just attract the types of people who improve society themselves?
2) Most people aren't a big fan of being told they have to move cities/countries to continue living their lifestyle. I suspect that Lesswrong users as a cohort undervalue stability relative to the rest of the population.
It's worth noting that factory farming isn't just coincidentally out of the limelight, in some (many?) areas it's illegal to document. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag
While many of these laws seem somewhat reasonable on the surface, since they're billed as strengthening trespass law, you can't gather video evidence of a moral crime taking place on private property without at least some form of trespass.
I think a different use of MI is warranted here. While I highly doubt the ability to differentiate whether a value system is meshing well with someone for "good" or "bad" reasons, it seems more plausible to me that you could measure the reversibility of a value system.
The distinguishing feature of a trap here isn't so much the badness, as the fact that it's irreversible. If you used interpretability techniques to check whether someone could be reprogrammed from a belief, you'd avoid a lot of tricky situations.
Apologies for the late reply.
With a bit over 600k 0-3 year Olds in swim lessons at the time of the linked report, and around 1.2 million children in that age range in Australia, I'd estimate at least half of kids below 4 have taken swim lessons. So quite common, but not to the extent that I had thought.
Notably, swim lessons for young children are highly subsidized by most states, with many offering a fixed number of free lessons.
A bit later in primary school, the majority of kids will be given free swim lessons at their local public pool though.
Are child swim lessons common in America? Over here, free swim lessons are now provided for children, and mandatory swim lessons are provided as part of primary school. My understanding is that it's made a relatively large dent in the rate of child drowning injury.
In particular, once your child is proficient at swimming, you can get lessons on plain clothes swimming incase of a trip, fall, or if another kid needs rescuing.
A transplant seems unnecessary if there's any realistic change of probe technology advancing. Surely it'd be possible to grow the same neurones in wet lab, use brain probes to connect them to a living person, and keep the tinkering inside someone's head to a minimum.
(Putting aside the profound ethical issues) In that case, neuronal material could even be swapped out on the fly if one batch is proving ineffective for a given task (or, a new batch could have old signals replayed to it to get it up to speed).
Is there something I'm missing on the neuroscience end? I'm not at all familiar with the field.
I'd just note, that you should be cautious of people "answering" this question in hindsight.
In both of the two subjects that I feel most professionally confident in and have had the chance to teach (maths and computer science) you'll see people sharing a common refrain. "If only I'd learnt {Complicated method/language/Mental Model} first, I'd have saved myself so much time."
The most common examples I've seen of this are people who are convinced that teaching kids pointer juggling is gonna give them a stronger foundation for CS, or the cult of "Linear Algebra Done Right" (a book that I love, but that isn't a good introduction to the field imo).
"Lies to children" exist for a reason, and while some might be skippable, many form useful intellectual scaffolds.